Go Green Part 2: Challenges
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
Going green and making the effort to create a more sustainable environment – especially in the workplace – is surely a worthy cause. In many instances, waste and energy savings can also translate to cost savings, but even so, some transformations can make quite a dent in the budget. Here 
at Chameleon, we try to be equally budget-conscious and environmentally friendly. However, we are also limited by the fact that we reside in a large office complex and have relatively little control over the premises as a whole. How do we continue to grow our green business practices? Here are a few of our ideas.
Power down
The first, and one of the simplest, things to do is to make sure to turn off lights when not in use. This should be a no-brainer. We are lucky to have some huge windows to let in natural light, but we try to make use of smaller floor lamps rather than having the overhead fluorescents on all the time. In some areas, we even remove a few of the bulbs that we don’t need. We also make it a policy to turn off monitors and power down other electronics, as well as to unplug non-essentials like extra lamps and heaters.
Use less, waste less
In addition to saving energy, we do our best to reduce our waste output. In an office like ours, that means trying to use less paper. Utilizing double-sided printing, re-using old pages as scratch paper, and converting to more electronic documents are all easy and cost-effective methods. We recycle as much as we can, too, including electronics and other office supplies. One other way to reduce consumption is to keep a precise inventory of supplies – there is greater potential for buying unneeded supplies when you don’t know what you already have.
There are so many different ways for a business to be more sustainable these days that it can be overwhelming – even if you have been at it for a while. The thing to remember, though, is that every little bit does count, so even the smallest efforts are important. Create a plan that fits your budget and focus on doing whatever is feasible. Measure your efforts as you would with any goal-oriented project. Green resources will undoubtedly become cheaper and more easily accessible, so those bigger modifications may not be as far off as you think!
Category What's new with Chameleon | Tags: Tags: green business,
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