Simple Steps To Creating and Mantaining a Green Office

Establishing green office policies for your business can have far reaching social and economic benefits.  Promoting a green office doesn't neccessarily mean that you have to overhaul your entitre business operation.  There are many simple and inexpensive ways to create a more green office environment.  The items below are just a few steps that you can take toward creating and maintainging a green office at your place of business.

Paper Products- Reduce, reuse and recycle.  These three words should outline the paper use standards for a succesful green office intiative.  In addition to the environmental benefits of this strategy, it can also cut paper costs and reduce the need for storage.  Some examples of incorporating these practices into your green office would be using both sides of a sheet of paper instead of just one side (this also can also reduce the cost of mailing lengthy documents by 25% or more), emailing documents instead of faxing or snail mail and purchasing 100% recycled content and unbleached copy paper & envelopes.    

Office Lighting - This is one area of your green office initiative where a dramatic a reduction in usage is possible without much extra effort or expense to your business.  In fact, some estimates indicate that a reduction in lighting energy of 50-75% is possible for many offices.  Here are a few simple and cost effective ways that you can reduce lighting energy usage on your way to a green office.  Use energy efficient bulbs that consume less electicity, put your lights on a dimmer switch and even use natural light when possible.  Be sure that outdoor light sources such as parking lot lights are turned on only when needed and consider eliminating landscape lighting alltogether.  Perhaps the most basic of all is to turn off the lights and equipment in all rooms when they are not in use.