June 19, 2009
Greening your business: Easy things you can implement NOW
I subscribe to The Green Life and find lots of great tips there for being more environmentally friendly, both in my work and at home. Many of their tips are things I wasn’t aware of, or at least didn’t think about. Take screensavers — originally they were put in place to stop burning out the bulbs in or CRT, but with the new screens, we don’t need to worry about that any more. So, you can change your screensaver to [blank] when not in use. Sure, some of us have great screen shows that play when we’re not using our computers; but how ’bout switching to ‘blank’ at night or on weekends, to save some juice?
My kids are in the habit of removing their phone chargers and laptop chargers from the wall when not actively in use - that should save us some do-re-mi (money) but also prevent our local utility from generating wasted electricity. Rule of thumb: if it is bigger than a 3 prong plug, it’s probably consuming electricity. Our scanner, which has a big ‘box’ attached to the plug, is also unplugged when not in use (we only scan approximately 1x/week) as well as our chargers.
Ambient temperature — do you wear sweaters to work in the summer? (Lots of folks do - or keep one in the office). If this is true, talk to your facilities folks to see if the building can be raised 1 degree this summer (or lowered 1 degree in winter). We at McDCG work at ‘extremes’ of temperature in an effort to be more environmentally friendly — it helps that we’re a shorts/t-shirt/flip flops company when not meeting clients. But, we do have fans going in lieu of lower A/C temps (moving air tends to make you feel cooler), and space heaters in the winter (which are more efficient than heating huge amounts of unused areas. Maybe the staff will weigh in that we’ve gone TOO far… we’ll see).
Computer donation — when upgrading your computers at work, separate the working from the non-working, and consider donating the working ones to a local school, non-profit, etc. that can use them. They will be grateful, you’ll get a tax write-off, and the landfill or e-waste recycler will avoid having to handle these components (just yet).
The Green Life has lots of tips - sent to your inbox on a daily basis. Give it a look-see and see what you can glean from it.
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