So everything else in your life has gone green, but what about your office life? Just think of it: millions of pages of paper printed for review, candy wrappers and styrofoam cups to keep you going (or is this just my job…?)

There are a couple easy ways to green your office life:

Turn everything off at the end of the day

There’s no sense in wasting electricity at night when no one’s there. Turn your monitor off and if your IT department will allow it, your computer off as well. Turn off any desk lamps and other lights, as well as scanners, printers, etc.

Use electronic documents instead of printing

Printing something just for review doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, use PDFs and emails to communicate. Your company will save money on toner or ink, and paper. It’s also a lot easier to organize electronic documents compared to having a mound of paper on your desk.

Overall the best thing you can do to green your office is to avoid waste whenever possible. If you can email it, don’t print it. Recycle as much as you can. Turn off your electronics when not in use. You might not be employee of the month for doing so, but you’ll feel better for taking that little extra effort.

Carpool to work

This one is often not used because people don’t know how to organize a carpool or don’t want to rely on other people. Once you get in the hang of it however it’s a great way to help the environment and save money on gas.

There are a couple carpooling websites out there which will help you organize a carpool as well. CarpoolTool is a great one for Canada. They will automatically match you with anyone close by if you have no one to carpool with. iCarpool is another website with similar features.

Lighter Footstep has more tips on greening your office.

Also check out Bootstrapper’s 50 ways to green your office.

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You’ve no doubt read about the water-powered alarm clocks, but have you ever seen a clock made out of paper?

This clock is made from “printed paper”, it’s like a printed circuit board, the circuit is contained on simple paper. You even crumple it up to turn it off!

This alarm clock is made from a flat piece of paper with the various circuits printed on it. It’s assembled by cutting out the various parts and sticking it all together. The display, batteries and processor are all created from a printing the circuit board on a normal piece of paper.

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In a new development on sustainable fuels, Scientists at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology have discovered a better way to product Biodiesel.

Biodiesel is a fuel that is usually created by heating a mixture of vegetable oil, methanol and lye.

Typically, biodiesel is made by mixing methanol with lye and vegetable oil and then heating the brew for several hours. This bonds the methanol to the oils to produce energetic molecules called esters. Unfortunately, heating the mixture is a huge waste of energy, and a major selling point of alternative fuels is efficiency. An enzyme called lipase can link link oil to methanol without any extra heating, but the pure protein is expensive. -Wired

The method scientists have discovered uses a specific type of fungi that produces lipase naturally. The mixture is then passes through pellets made from this fungi, and voila! Cheap sustainable biofuel.

This discovery could bring the price of biofuel down dramatically as there are no costs associated with heating the mixture and there is no need to purchase expensive lipase.

If the price of biofuel is cheap enough we could have a viable alternative to gasoline. The fuel is much more sustainable and better on the environment than gasoline.

If this discovery gets mass-market appeal we could all be driving ’shroom powered cars in the near future!

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That’s right, it’s WATER power right in your hands!

An alarm clock is such a simple necessity in todays world. You’ve gotta to be up early and on-time. But what if the power goes out?
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