How Green is Your Office?

We're all quite properly concerned about reducing our carbon footprints and being environmentally responsible. At home, we reduce, reuse, and recycle -- but what about at work?

Today, let's think about the office in particular.

Begin with your energy use:

• Do you use energy-efficient appliances, including your IT systems?
• Do you use energy-efficient lightbulbs?
• Do you turn off lights and equipment when they're not in use?
  
• Do you tolerate a little discomfort (within the safe levels for your equipment) to keep heater and AC use at a minimum?
• Do you use energy-efficient vehicles?
  
• Do you use GotoMeeting, Google Docs, or Adobe Connect to lessen physical travel?
• Do you walk, use stairs, and otherwise limit the amount of non-human energy used for physical travel?
• Since retail space uses almost twice as much energy as manufacturing or office space, plus the energy cost of driving to retailers, do you use e-commerce as much as possible for buying office supplies, even while using local suppliers?
  

I'm actually pretty good when it comes to energy. I work at home, so that lessens my driving, and I'm very conservation-minded. I'm good about avoiding waste, too -- but then, as I was taking that mental inventory, I thought about paper.

Paper accounts for 40% of the waste stream, and the manufacturing of paper is one of the dirtiest businesses, from an environmental standpoint.

I have to confess that I can feel somewhat smug about paper sometimes. I teach college English, and I am the most paper-light in my department. I collect, comment, and return papers by email, I use computers in the classroom, my only handout in the course of a normal semester is a syllabus (one page front and back), and I do hands-on stuff in the classroom instead of quizzes. Some of my classes are entirely online.

And of course I write for the web, so I'm not professionally responsible for much paper use. In fact, by helping people to switch to online marketing rather than relying on paper, I'm definitely helping. Working in the medium of electricity has its environmental impact, of course, but your computer is on anyway, and the savings on paper makes up for it -- right?



This is my paper. It isn't always strewn around in this untidy fashion. It's just an embarrassing coincidence that today, as I was writing about greening up the office, I happen to have an absolute welter of paper here.

Do you believe me?

Never mind. We're not talking about personal tidiness here. We're talking about paper use, and I actually have a lot of it around for someone who thinks of herself as a paper-light environmentalist. How about you?

And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

Taking it from the top, we can see that some of the paper is about basic office functions like filing and bookkeeping. Here are some online alternatives:

• Outright for simple bookkeeping, including things like quarterly estimated tax payments.
• SmartPay electronic billing system for invoicing the green way -- they're serious enough to pay for your Sierra Club membership when you join.
• Highrise, from 37 Signals, covers your client filing. I confess (since this is obviously True Confessions day) that I haven't tried this one yet, but the guys over at Clevertech are enormous 37 Signals fans, and I don't aspire ever to reach their level in office systems.
  

The next category of paper we can see is the planner. This is another function that can be done online instead of on paper. You probably already have MS Outlook or something similar. Here are some other paperless applications:

• Toggl for tracking time and projects without sacrificing trees for the purpose.
• Google Calendar for most calendar-related tasks, including sharing your calendar and integrating it into a website.
• Basecamp is an easy collaborative project management tool.
• TaDaList is my favorite online to-do list app. There's also Remember the Milk.

If you use paper for thinking (and you know what I mean, if you do it), then consider MindMap. Less stylish, but free, is FreeMind.

That leaves us at the bottom of that embarrassing picture with research.

Sometimes you have to read stuff. And much of what we read is on paper. If we keep and use books for years, then we're not wasting paper. But much of what we read is pretty ephemeral. So I'm looking into alternatives.

• Virtual magazines and online newspapers are becoming commonplace. Since someone has to pay for that stuff, you're likely to find yourself locked out of some content, compared with print editions, but there's a lot available.
  
• PDF downloads and e-books are also an option. Since we generally pay for these, you can find more and more of the books you want available in these formats. Is the experience as good as reading print? This is one of the biggest questions. It might be worth stretching the point in order to save paper.
  
• The Kindle may be the solution for readers who want to cut paper use without sacrificing the opportunity to read comfortably on the beach. Amazon sent me one as a perk for a literary gig, and I have to say that it feels like reading a book. You can't flip through pages quickly to find things, but nothing in this life is perfect. I've put it in the picture with an organizer so you can see the size of it -- quite different from e-books read on a cell phone.
  

At the very least, we can all consider using some of the possibilities here to reduce our paper use. We can make sure to reuse paper by using the backs of sheets for scratch paper and note-taking. We can get out of the habit of printing emails or articles out to read them (don't laugh; lots of people do it). And we can recycle used paper -- but without getting the idea that recycling absolves us of the need to reduce and reuse.

Stumble It!