Home News Tips For Keeping Your Workplace Environmentally Friendly

Tips For Keeping Your Workplace Environmentally Friendly

More than ever, people are aware of their impact on the environment and making positive changes to their lifestyles for the good of our world. While this may be something that we do at home, we should also try to think about how we can make our workplaces more environmentally friendly. If you think that ‘good for the environment’ means ‘more expensive’, you might be pleasantly surprised, as many measures to save energy and reuse may save your business money in the long run. Here are some pointers for how to run an eco-friendly workplace.

Energy Efficiency

Revising your workplace energy efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint. It can also save your business a substantiable amount of money in the long run.

To start, look at the appliances used by your business – many older appliances are not energy efficient which means they are bad for the environment and more expensive to run. When investing in new appliances, check their energy efficiency ratings, and also make sure your old appliances are recycled or disposed of correctly. You should also check how appliances are used; are lights being left on when they are not needed? Are computers shut down correctly? Investing in an energy meter will help you to identify when your workplace is using excessive energy.

Schedule Regular Servicing and Maintenance

Energy assessments are valuable tools in identifying areas which require improvement. A plan can then be created, outlining steps which can be taken to save energy and bring energy costs down. Regular energy and lighting maintenance are important to ensure your business runs efficiently and doesn’t spend more energy than it needs to. Lighting audits are a vital part of this, analyzing how your business uses energy for lighting and deciding whether it can be streamlined or improved to reduce costs, increase comfort for employees and lower the business’s carbon footprint.

Temperature control can also be assessed to find out if buildings are being heated efficiently, and whether any heat is being lost through poor insulation. Regular maintenance and servicing ensures that all fixtures and appliances are working properly, and efficiency has not been reduced through age or damage.

Re-use, Refill, Recycle

Businesses can produce a lot of waste, so you should look into ways to reduce this. Ensure supplies are not being wasted and consider refillable alternatives for items such as pens. Reduce how much you contribute to landfill by recycling where you can; for example, many companies now offer recycling services for items such as ink cartridges. Choosing your suppliers carefully can also help to improve your impact on the environment. Where you can, choose local suppliers or those that re-use, refill or recycle their products or packaging materials.

You may not be able to implement all these steps in your business, but if all workplaces were able to just take one or two of these steps, it would make a huge difference to our impact on the environment.

Leave a Reply