Cut Costs and Green Your Office

If you are reading this, you likely have made some personal choices to be more sustainable at home. But when one third of our lives is spent at work, it’s more important than ever to employ green habits in the workplace. By reducing energy and waste you can also save money and cut costs while making your office more sustainable.

Use the Revolving Door

When many people are coming into the office in the morning there can be a traffic jam at the revolving door. However, waiting the extra 30 seconds to enter your building through the revolving door can have a major impact on your building’s energy usage. Passing through swing doors allows about eight times more air to flow in or out of a building compared to revolving doors, according to a 2006 MIT study. This means that if every person used their building’s revolving door an average of 80,000 kilowatt-hours of energy would be saved, which is equal to a 14.6-ton reduction in carbon dioxide.

Replace the watercooler with a bottle-less water filtration unit

Choosing a water cooler that is dependent on tap water instead of bottled water jugs can greatly reduce your waste and your costs. On average, consumers are spending 300 times the cost of tap water to drink bottled water, and often times tap water is found to be even cleaner than bottled water. Switching to filtered water coolers can also avoid the 70 million pounds of plastic waste generated by bottled water annually.

Optimize natural light

Although you may not have complete control over your office’s access to natural light, there are a variety of things you can do to optimize natural sunlight and reduce your energy-use. No one wants glare or direct sunlight to make their workspace uncomfortably hot, but by diffusing natural light with adjustable blinds or protective films you can maximize daylight hours. You can also paint your walls and ceiling

Choose Reusable Dishes

Switching to reusable dishes can greatly reduce your office’s waste and energy footprint. With just 10 uses, reusable plastic dishes become more sustainable than single use plastic, and with 17 uses it becomes more sustainable than comparable paper products. Making the switch may have higher initial costs, but they quickly pay themselves off and are a better investment than disposable dishes in the long term.

By: Korinna Garfield