If individuals can go green in their homes, can’t those self-same people start making the businesses where they are employed, go green also? With all of the waste in the workforce, an amazing amount of money and energy could be saved with only a little initiative. There seems to be so little attention for keeping things clean today, or for preventing waste. Older generations, having lived in lean times, understood the wisdom of being penny-wise.
Going green need not be onerous or costly for business, given the many easy ways it can be carried out – but the environmental rewards would be great. Office equipment in general, but specifically the office printer, are things which offer opportunities for change. If offices consumed less paper, fewer trees would need to be cut down. Paper utilization can be cut in half simply by using both sides of the paper. Trees do a task which is valuable to the environment, which is to take out carbon dioxide from the environment during photosynthesis. Cutting down on the amount of paper they use is simply one of the ways in which offices can become earth-friendly.
The vast internet spider web that spans the entire world, linking people and businesses, should mean that a lessening in business travel could be implemented. Those conferences attended by individuals from all over and far away could be done away with, saving lots of money and energy. Business travel is often done in large automobiles and jet aircraft, which has a considerable effect on the atmosphere and the planet’s energy resources. Video conferencing may be done more inexpensively as opposed to jet travel. One of the boons of the internet is that numerous office jobs can now be done from home, which means a reduction in travel by car and lower office expenses. However, this won’t work for every job, but all the same it can make a difference.
Switching to email instead of paper-based communications is a simple way for a commercial enterprise to go green. By just choosing to pay bills online, a huge amount of paper may be saved. Our planet will be better off, with more business tasks done electronically rather than with paper. Laptops use a lot less than energy than desktop computers and monitors, so there’s an additional way offices could save energy. A PC plus monitor use more or less 270 watts of energy, while a laptop uses 50 watts, at the most. An added energy benefit of laptop computers is sleep mode, which is automatically entered after a certain period of not being used, typically set to between 15 and 20 minutes.
For people who think they are saving energy with screensavers, the opposite is true, as they consume more energy. The most effective way for a commercial enterprise to become green, and save lots of money, would be to shut down all computers and laptops when they are not in use. Sufficient energy to meet the power needs of the city of Chicago for a year would be saved by all business organizations doing this.