Your Eco-Friendly Office: Tips for Going Green

Trying to plan an eco-friendly office? It’s easier than you might think to pull the plug on some environmentally unfriendly practices and plug into ones that not only save your company money but the planet in the process. We talk to our clients every day about the eco-friendly office benefits of electronic document management solutions, but we’ll add to the list in today’s post so we appeal to even those offices where large-scale document scanning isn’t a feasible business solution.

• Get Twisted: Small and large offices alike can benefit from replacing incandescent light fixtures with the new-fangled compact florescent light bulbs. These curly creatures not only last longer but really add to an eco-friendly office bottom line by lowering replacement costs AND decreasing energy consumption year-round.
• Think Before You Print: How often do you print emails? You take take your green office practices right into someone else’s by adding a simple “think before you print” line in your email signature. Do you really need to print that email? Think twice and save paper. Planet Green has a great article on the practice here. You can find an icon to add to your email signature by doing a simple web image search for “think before you print.”
• Get Rid of the Phone: If you’re like me, I’ve got three old cell phones in my drawers that I no longer use. Why not hold an office-wide cell phone drive and recycle those bad boys? Use this handy article for Five Ways to Donate Your Cell Phone to Charity. Clean out those desk drawers and do some good with those phones.
• Shred: The average 16 inch banker box weighs 30 pounds (when filled with paper). If you were to shred four of those boxes, you would save a tree. Think about it……4 boxes = one tree. At times, it’s hard for us think of what we can do locally to solve global problems. Start with one banker box and shred it. Our friends at Xpress Shred have partnered with Steele Street Bank and Trust this weekend for a Shred Day! If you’re in the Denver/Boulder area, don’t miss it! This free service is a great way to get involved. Bring your old tax returns, bank statements, credit card statements, and anything else of a private nature that you’d like to shred and get it done!
  • When: Saturday, April 24th, 2010 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
  • Where: Steele Street Bank and Trust, 55 Adams Street, Denver
  • Cost: Free
• The Paper Trail: We work with companies in a diverse range of industries to help them lessen their carbon footprint and take their document management practices green. Your eco-friendly office can do a few things to get yourselves off the paper crutch: document scanning lessens storage space and the risk of lost documents, stocking only recycled paper makes your printing come around and go around and when you use recycling bins strategically placed throughout the office, you’re reminding employees to pitch it in the right place.

Posted by: John Cushman on April 20th, 2010 // View Comments
Posted in: Document Management and Storage
Tags: eco-friendly, green office
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