7 Ways To Go Green This Holiday Season
Here’s how your brand can help protect the environment!
With the holiday season coming up, we want to encourage companies to go green. There are numerous ways to help protect the earth, and doing so helps sustain natural resources and can even help businesses save money. In fact, in 2016, 190 of the Fortune 500 companies saved close to $3.7B through collective renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives.
Therefore, we want to share some practices that can lead to more environmentally friendly and ecologically responsible workplaces. In order to go green this holiday season...
Turn off the lights! An easy first step is to remind employees to turn off lights when leaving rooms. To take this even further, your office can switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, can invest in a sensor that turns lights off when no one is around and/or can implement work-from-home days; for many brands, the holiday season is a slow one, so consider working from home a day or two a week.
Similarly, computers and other machines in the workplace should be turned off when they are not being used. Computers can also be set to sleep after a few minutes, so that when someone runs off to the restroom, to a meeting or to the phone, energy is being conserved.
The majority of automobiles' environmental impact surrounds emissions of air pollution and greenhouse gases, which are said to be driving global warming. In order to cut back on this, encourage your office to carpool, bike or walk to work. And when that holiday party rolls around, maybe you can rent a limo to pick everyone up in, so that one vehicle is being used instead of many!
Speaking of negative effects on the environment, many household items can be swapped out for environmentally friendly ones. This means opting for nontoxic cleaners and recycled materials. Specifically, in the kitchen at work, there should be real dishes for people to use (not plastic/paper/styrofoam ones), such as these reusable water bottles and branded mugs, which are made out of eco-friendly materials. These also make great holiday gifts!
The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year, so pay attention to this part: Try to cut down on your use. Urge your office to go digital when possible. Unsubscribe from unnecessary mailing lists/publications, and make sure your office is sending a digital holiday card out instead of printing out numerous copies of a paper one.
And, of course, companies should be recycling as much as possible - especially with all that paper that is being used by the average worker!
Our final tip for going green is to stock the office with green products; solar-powered power banks, notebooks made out of recycled materials, eco-friendly bags and flash drives made out of bamboo are just a couple of options that can be provided to new employees, given out as incentives/presents and kept around the office...the eco-friendly office.
How does your brand work to be environmentally friendly and ecologically responsible?
