A big part of going green is reducing your carbon footprint. These five tips will help you do just that, boosting sustainability and making your company more efficient.
Move toward zero waste
Moving toward zero waste begins with an assessment of your business’s current waste generation, management and disposal. During the audit, you can identify where waste is being generated, how often, and where it goes. From there, you can set waste diversion, prevention, and reduction goals and institute policies to achieve them.
Switch to LED lighting
LED lighting is one of the most energy efficient forms of lighting a business can use, other than natural daylight of course. LED bulbs use approximately 15 times less electricity than halogen lighting, significantly reducing a business’s carbon footprint.
Cycle to work
Instead of relying on the car or other gas-guzzling transport, cycle to work by bike. Not only will you stop emitting nasty CO2s into the atmosphere on your daily commute, but you’ll get fit in the process. Encourage other colleagues and employees to cycle to work as well.
Find alternatives to cloud computing
Do you really need to backup 25 practically identical photos by uploading them to the cloud? Every photo, video, and file you save is stored there over and over again for security reasons and that consumes energy each time. According to a Greenpeace study, globally cloud computing consumes more electricity than all of Germany put together. Regularly cleaning up in the cloud and deleting useless files saves energy. And: USB sticks or external hard drives are a good storage alternative – and they protect your private data from unauthorized access by others too.
Unplug phone chargers
It might be tempting to keep your phone charger plugged in whilst at work but such appliances consume significant amounts of electricity even when they’re not in use but still plugged in.
