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When I was in 4th grade, I started a Save the Earth Club. Yes, there was only one other person in it and we didn’t do too much besides telling our parents they should take shorter showers and making sure the fridge didn’t stay open longer than 5 seconds. (Hey, all those little things add up, right?) I was passionate about learning how to go green and tried to share it with everyone I knew.
Companies are starting to get greener. According to PR Newswire, one in ten employers have added “green jobs” in the past 12 months and 70% of companies say they have added environmentally conscious programs such as using less paper and powering down computers at the end of the day.
If you are a little unsure of what exactly will happen to our earth in the future, Timeline: Earth’s Precarious Future gives you some predictions of what our future generations will have to deal with. Water shortages, diseases, floods and multiple animal extinctions. Not good! So what can we do to try to help the future of our earth.
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Here are a few suggestions to go green at work:
1. Bring recyclable bags to the grocery store and for lunches at work.
2. Help your company become more environmentally friendly. Maybe you can convince your company to give away free items to help others start to be more earth friendly. The way my husband and I started bringing recyclable bags to the grocery store is because Vons gave away free bags with each purchase.
3. Make sure all the lights in the house and work are eco-friendly to help conserve energy. Consider installing light sensors overhead that will automatically turn the lights on when someone enters the room.
4. According to Inc., U.S. businesses still use about 21 million tons of paper each year. I know we use too much paper at my work because people are more comfortable reviewing important documents on paper. We need to rely more on e-mail to send and review reports, edit materials online and always ask that information be sent to you electronically instead of hard copy.
5. Encourage your company to offer transit passes to employees who take the bus or subway or other benefits for biking or using carpools.
6. Make teleworking available to your employees. Kate Lister of the Telework Research Network points out that “if 40 percent of the work force worked remotely just half the time, that there would be 100 hours saved per person not spent commuting, 50 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions cut, 276 million barrels of oil saved, or roughly 32 percent of oil imports from the Middle East, and $700 billion total estimated savings to American businesses, all annually.” If that isn’t convincing, I don’t know what is.
What will you do to go green at work?
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