Greenbiz.com reported on November 17 that a floor covering manufacturer in Atlanta called Interface decided to take another look at reducing its emissions.
The article interviews and quotes Jim Hartzfeld, an Interface Raise (Interface’s “sustainable consulting unit”) managing director. According to the story:
“So, Hartzfeld picked a day to pull all of the dumpsters into the parking lot and empty them out. He then had employees wade through the trash to see what they were throwing away and categorize it into piles. They found plastic containers, broken wooden pallets and dozens of other materials that had the potential for reuse.
"’It got us talking about how we could keep these materials from becoming waste by using them in some productive way,’ he said.”
The article doesn’t mention what the Interface employees came up with, which is a shame.
However, the article mentions another company, Melavar, "a sustainable real estate company based in Savannah, GA," which discovered yet another often-overlooked way to save money and conserve a precious resource – water – by replacing the company’s bathroom faucets.
Quoting, Tommy Linstroth, director of sustainability, the article says:
“‘The flow rate on most bathroom faucets is 2.2 gallons per minute,’ Linstroth says. "That's the same amount of water you use to take a shower. It's a ridiculous and unnecessary overuse.
“Melavar replaced all of its bathroom faucet aerators -- which control water flow -- with 0.5 gallon per minute versions, although Linstroth notes that aerators come in a range of flow rates. Aerator cost $2 to $3 and are screwed right on to the faucet, making them as easy to change as a light bulb.
"’For $3 per faucet, we curtailed our water use by 50 to 75 percent. If every employee washes their hands three times a day, that's a substantial amount of water savings over a year,’ he says. ‘This is a no-brainer.’"
We suggest you take a look at the article. It will help you take a second and third look at how your company can have less impact on the environment.
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( 2.4 / 7 ) 
Photo courtesy document-management-software.com
If this article doesn’t convince you to use less paper and recycle more of it at your place of work, well...
The Guardian writer Tony Juniper states that “...paper is everywhere. We use more and more of it and its impact is huge.”
How huge?
“Paper manufacture consumes vast quantities of water. Chemicals are used to boost fast-growing monoculture plantations, and pulp mills discharge huge quantities of chemicals. In terms of energy consumption in its production, paper equals steel.
Combine this with deforestation and emissions from landfill and we find that the pulp and paper industry contributes around 10% of global carbon emissions – that's about three times global aviation emissions.”
Juniper goes on to site a Xerox study that found that office workers trash a massive 45 percent of the paper printed each day. Each. Day.
He references another study by ForestEthics that states
“Greenhouse gases created each year by junk mail are the annual equivalent of more than nine million cars. The average car travels 12,000 miles per year -- as opposed to junk mail, which gets us nowhere.”
Adds Juniper:
“While we are increasingly aware of the emissions from our cars, how many people are cutting down on paper? How many companies correctly account for their paper footprint in their CRS reports?”
What can you and I do? Well, Juniper says, we can “[s]tart by not printing this post, or indeed anything else, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
We second that idea.
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( 2.6 / 7 ) Personally, we like to recycle. So long as it’s not too much work.
Sound familiar? After all, at least in our town, we can’t just put the paper products in the big blue bin with the plastic and the glass. Noooo. We have to place the paper and the cardboard (and we must open all boxes and flatten those things Flat with a capital F!) and place them in a separate plastic or paper bag.
It’s work. And sometimes, well, we’re lazy and we just throw the gosh darn paper product in with our regular trash.
After all, we justify to ourselves, recycling doesn’t really have a positive impact on reducing the amount of junk in landfills (we say, because we remember reading it somewhere sometime).
Or does it?
Well, PopularMechanics.com says recycling does have a positive impact on keeping trash out of landfills.
Here’s an item that warmed our lazy, but guilt-ridden hearts for all the times we didn’t separate the paper from the blue bin: Don't the trucks used to pick up the recyclable materials from your sidewalk emit more pollutants into the air than are saved by recycling? Well...
“‘You're going to collect waste one way or another,’ points out Jeff Morris, a Washington-based environmental consultant. A recycling program should allow garbage collection to become less frequent (or to use fewer trucks), offsetting the cost and energy involved. Plus, new truck designs can collect both recycling and garbage (at different times), avoiding the huge capital expense of an extra fleet. They can also self-dump specially designed bins, saving time and manpower.”
Read the whole article, titled “Recycling Myths: PM Debunks 5 Half Truths about Recycling.” In addition to the myth busted above, we also liked the debunking of myth number 3, that you and I must place the paper in a different bin than our plastics, otherwise recycling must be done by hand and that’s, well, wasteful:
“These days, processors are beginning to move toward "single-stream" material recovery facilities, which allow homeowners to dump all their recycling in one bin and rely on machines to do the dirty work. According to Eileen Berenyi, a consultant who studies solid waste management, the number of single-stream facilities in the U.S. jumped from 70 in 2001 to 160 in 2007.”
Hallellujah! Let my blue bin full of glass and plastic say hello to my newspapers!!!!
***
Here’s a spiffy online tool to help green your office environment. It’s brought to us by the Environmental Protection Agency at its ENERGY STAR site . Called ENERGY STAR @work, it’s an animated, interactive office cubical. Click on the stars scattered about the piece and you’ll learn nifty tidbits about how to make your office space more energy efficient.
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( 2.8 / 16 ) Amazon believes it’s built a better shipping package. One that’s more environmentally friendly, to boot.
The online behemoth calls it “frustration-free packaging.” It calls it “an initiative designed to make it easier for customers to liberate products from their packages.” (We must admit, we rather like the “liberate products from their packages” phrase, because, after all, who hasn’t felt the pain of taking a large toy from its packaging, as demonstrated in this little video Amazon put together to demonstrate its new product.)
The new packaging will be used to ship 19 products from such manufacturers – mostly toy manufacturers – as Fisher-Price, Mattel and a few others.
One of the toys to be packaged in the new box is the Fisher-Price Imaginext Adventures Pirate Ship (the one featured in the video). According to the Amazon news release, the new packaging for this toy
“eliminates 36 inches of plastic-coated wire ties, 1,576.5 square inches of printed corrugated package inserts and 36.1 square inches of printed folding carton materials. Also eliminated are 175.25 square inches of PVC blisters, 3.5 square inches of ABS molded styrene and two molded plastic fasteners.”
What’s more, the “frustration-free” box can be re-used as a great garage for your child’s miniature trucks, or reconfigured into an addition to the cardboard doll house.
And we all know that the boxes the toys come in make the best playthings for imaginative children anyway....
(from www.flickr.com/photos/ahhyeah/454494396/)
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( 2.8 / 11 ) See all those high rise office buildings in your city? Full of corner offices and cubicles? Filled with managers and their staff toiling away, working hard...
Wait a minute. Perhaps there aren’t that many people in all those office buildings after all.
Greenbiz.com in an October 27 article , talked with John Anderson, president and CEO of PeopleCube in Framingham, Mass. Anderson, according to the Greenbiz.com article, says that “[r]eal estate executives and facility managers at medium to large companies are sometimes way off when it comes to occupancy rates.... Most think their facilities are being used 80 or 90 percent of the time. Upon tracking the data, they are often surprised to learn that they are using their space less than 50 percent of the time.” (Emphasis ours.)
The reason employees aren’t there as much as one would expect?
They’re working at home. They’re telecommuting.
“Facilities represent the second highest expense for large businesses and the No. 1 manufacturer of emissions, according [to] Anderson. Many employers are paying too much to heat and cool conference rooms that are hardly used and to illuminate cubicles too often left empty. Allowing employees to telecommute from home at least part of the week could cut costs significantly.”
Darn straight! If half of your employees worked from home, just think of the cost savings in energy usage. Have half your employees telecommute and the savings would allow you to purchase all your telecommuters a great ergonomic desk chair for their home offices....
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