5 Surprising Secrets to a Greener Office

marketing planPut these five tips into practice to improve your efforts at creating a greener office environment for your employees and business.

It has become extremely important for everyone to think about the consequences of their actions on the environment. This is because we all need to play a role to reverse or to at least stop the damage that we’ve caused to the environment over time. To this end, here are three surprising secrets to having a greener office that you can put to use right away and start walking the talk.

1. Label Recycling, Compost, and Trash Bins Clearly

The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have different bins in your office for trash, compost, and recyclable items. Don’t stop at this, but label them clearly to ensure that there’s no mix-up between them. When you do this, it will be a lot easier for people to put the different items in the necessary place and become more efficient easily. This way, you can create an environment in which it’s effortless to do what’s right.

2. Invest in Shades For the Windows

Another way in which you can make your office greener is by getting quality shades for your windows. Doing this will help you minimize your dependence on heating and cooling, which has been found to account for up to 48% of the energy used in a home. All you need to do is to make sure you keep windows open when you need light and warmth from the sun in your offices and shut them when you want to minimize the two. When you become efficient at this, you will find that you need to use the AC a lot less often.

3. Go Paperless

With the amount of communication that goes on in any given business, both within its walls and between external parties, it’s clear to see how much paper can end up being used to this end. With different digital options available to us in the current age, however, it’s possible to elongate the use of paper in your office altogether. If you do this successfully, you will do a lot to save the trees and help keep the environment green, as you will have played a considerable role in decreasing the demand for paper in the first place.

4. Keep Your Appliances Serviced

Another way to help keep the environment green is to make sure you service your office appliances as often as is necessary to do so. This will go a long way in keeping things energy-efficient, as when you change the air filter in your HVAC system, for instance, you can reduce the energy consumed in your home by between 5% and 15%. The benefits you will get when everything in your office is running optimally can’t be ignored, so ensure to keep your appliances in good shape at all times.

5. Plug Off Devices

Finally, it may not be enough to power off the appliances in your office, as they will still consume power in this state. Because of this, you need to always unplug your appliances at the end of each day before you leave the office. Prepare a duty roster and assign this task to a different person each day so that it can become the collective duty of each member of your office. As an example of how this can be done, the Department of Energy states that you can save up to 10% every single year on your heating and cooling by turning your thermostat back between seven and 10 degrees for just eight hours a day.

When you put these five tips into practice, you will realize that it’s possible to improve your efforts at staying green as an office. Start today and you will teach your team how to live well in an environment that they’ve had a role in maintaining.

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Valerie M.

Contributor at Small Business Marketing Tools
Valerie M. is a writer from Upstate New York. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from The State University of New York at Fredonia in 2016 and is currently working at a digital marketing agency where she writes blog posts for a variety of small businesses all over the country. Valerie enjoys writing about music, animals, nature, and traveling.