3 Simple Tips to Green Your Office

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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