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Lessened Resources Mean Less Yield
Don’t wait for the memo. Green your business now. Here are the top 5 choices to bring your company or business into the green century. Adopt one or more of these sustainable living and sustainable working resource management methods and social responsibility.
Business norms have changed since the 1970’s, and many business conventions for different types of business have kept pace with environmental requirements. But some have not. If managerial efficiency is lacking, get crafty and write a letter suggesting eco-friendly change.
Faced with the demand for environmental benefit due to its practices, companies will adapt when their public profile is at stake.
1. Have a company wide recycling Fair
A company wide recycling fair operates like Freecycle except on a personal or corporate bulletin board or by word of mouth within a company location or campus. Usually one person or committee of persons will contribute time and the company will devote some resources toward hosting the recycling fair.
2. Change Purchasing Norms
Suggest to your building manager or administrator that a certain percentage of business supply products be post-consumer or recycled in nature. Find a way to utilize posters or other promotional eco-friendly reminders for less paper waste, less ink cartridge usage, and “virtual Friday”, where the office goes paperless.
3. Ask Questions
Examine your company’s policy toward green habitable space and green energy usage. Even casual employees notice inefficiency. Why are those lights left on all night? Why aren’t there any blue or green waste paper receptacles near the fax machine, copier and printer?
Bring recycling lessons from home. Who carries home the work compost from the kitchen bin? Is someone collecting cans and bottles? Do the coffee cups need to be disposable but not from recyclable materials?
4. Brown bag Bonuses
Get your company to support incentives to support employees brown bag it for their lunch hours. Dining out for lunch in a medium sized business means 25 cars and 25 sets of exhaust in the parking garage and in the streets. Buying volume sodas (of recyclable plastic) or providing napkins, plastic silverware, or fruit can get employees on the a brown bag bandwagon.
Brown bagging is a very good way to recycle. Employees can re-use packaging from home and cut down on a garbage bin full of fast food wrappers, non biodegradable plastic containers, and non-recyclable cups and other waste. Empty garbage bin Fridays work too. This is when no garbage in the kitchen waste can all day of a small or medium sized company allows everyone to go home 15 minutes early.
5. Promote the Option to Telecommute
Challenge your manager to support you and others to telecommute at least one day a week. The cost and environmental stress of an entire combustion vehicle can tax an entire metropolitan area over time. A telecommute option is no longer the fearsome technical security threat or lack of accountability issue it once was.
Investigate the possibility of a Saturday instead of Friday (or other weekday) work week. Traffic on weekends is lighter, vehicle efficiency is higher, and speeds can be lowered with less stop and start action. Parents could actually see their kids during the day.
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