VIDEO
Build a Strategy for Sustainability
Strategies You Can Use
So what can you do? We’ve organized strategies into four broad categories:
1. Clean up your own operations.
2. Manage your ripple effect.
3. Evaluate strategic threats.
4. Explore emerging opportunities.
Clean up your own operations
Typically, the impact of your own operations will be a fraction of the impacts you have outside your organization. For example, the amount of energy and materials used by an architectural firm is dwarfed by the energy and materials used in the buildings they design.
However, there are two good reasons to focus first on improving your own operations:
• This is often the best way to help your employees understand what sustainability is; and
• It ensures you are ‘walking the talk’, not asking others to do things you aren’t willing to do yourself.
There may be some actions that will save you money, but many of these actions are more important for their symbolic and educational value than for their financial value.
Facilities
Energy efficiency is the first place to look for measures that will save costs. Unfortunately, some businesses lease office space and so may not have separate electric meters. That means the savings may go first to the landlord and trickle down into the rent indirectly, if at all. If you own and operate your building, conducting an energy audit can yield significant opportunities to save money. If you lease, try to get your landlord to improve the sustainability of the building.
Here are a few stories to help inspire your own ideas:
• A large US laboratory discovered that many of their computers and monitors were left on even when not in use, often over night. According to their information technology professionals, in their situation, it was not wise to have everyone turn off their computers, but the monitors were fair game. So they printed small reminder labels and asked people to turn off their monitors when not in use. They estimate they saved $150,000 per year in energy costs. Granted, they have a large facility with a lot of computers, but this isn’t small change.
• Ashforth Pacific, a west-coast property management and construction firm in the US, implemented a ‘cookies-for-trash-cans’ project in which employees got cookies in exchange for agreeing to give up their individual rubbish bins and throwing all of their refuse away in a central bin. This simple project was easy for employees to participate in and saved the company 9000 plastic bin liners a year.2
• Progressive Investment Management focuses on socially responsible investing. When they hired a gardener to maintain their landscaping, they of course chose one known for organic methods. They were dismayed, in the spring, with their windows wide open, to find the gardener using a loud leaf-blower, belching gas fumes into their offices. They ended up agreeing to pay a little more to have the person rake instead.
• TriMet, the transit authority for Portland, Oregon, during one month of high electricity use at its rail facility posted the electricity bill in the elevator, without entreaties or comment. When employees saw how much they spent on energy, they modified their behaviour. Their electricity bill dropped by 20 per cent the next month!
• Washington Park Zoo in Oregon allows their employees to bring to work items that are difficult to recycle at home: compact fluorescent bulbs, batteries, etc. Since these items are added to the Zoo’s considerable pile from their own operations, the quantities are adequate to get them easily recycled.
Technology
Related to energy use is the choice of office equipment. In the US, computers, copiers, faxes, etc. represent the third largest electrical use (after lighting and heating/cooling) in commercial buildings. Since heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are used mostly for air conditioning, the impact of this equipment is multiplied because of the heat they contribute to buildings.
Mark Hamilton of Triple Point Energy Services makes the following recommendations:
• When upgrading, consider efficiency specifications as part of the purchasing policy.
Does it make more sense to have a bunch of small printers or a few large multifunction machines? When does it make sense to replace cathode ray tubes with liquid crystal displays (which are much more efficient)? What is the life of the office equipment and how should that be considered in terms of the environmental footprint of the organization? Look for more energy-efficient components, in particular power supplies. Set defaults for duplex printing, sleep modes, and automatic shut-down to reduce resource consumption.
• Examine your practices around end of life. Do you purchase equipment from manufacturers that take back their products, or, if you are a manufacturer, do you have a product stewardship strategy? Do you choose suppliers that have converted their products into services? If you donate usable equipment to non-profit organizations or schools, are you just passing on responsibility for end-of-life issues? Are all your components recycled or disposed of properly?
RESOURCES
(Accessed on April 26, 2013)
‘Working 9 to 5 on Climate Change: An Office Guide’ is a helpful booklet on reducing office climate impacts from the World Resources Institute. You can download a copy from www.wri.org/publication/working-9-5-climate-change-office-guide
.The US Environmental Protection Agency has created environmentally preferable guidelines for computers. Go to http://www.epa.gov/epp/pubs/products/electronic.htm
For power supplies, see www.80plus.org and www.efficientpowersupplies.org
Video: ‘Exporting Harm’. This 23-minute film documents the real consequences of exporting e-waste to developing countries for ‘recycling’. Produced by the Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the video can be ordered from BAN’s website, www.ban.org.
Williams, Eric. ‘Residential Computer Usage Patterns, Reuse and Life Cycle Energy Consumption in Japan’ (oral presentation), 2005 ACEEE (American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy) Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Industry, PANEL 4 – Industrial Energy Efficiency and Sustainability, http://www.eceee.org/summer_study/
Paper products
The dream of a paperless office has yet to materialize. In fact, the proliferation of computers and printers has only increased the rate at which we convert trees into refuse. Copy paper. Choosing among a wall of paper reams at an office supplier can be a daunting task. How much recycled content is in the product? Is it pre- or post-consumer?
What’s the difference between elemental chlorine free and chlorine free? Let’s make this easy: from an environmental perspective, generally the higher the recycled content, the better; post-consumer is better than pre-consumer; ‘process chlorine free (PCP)’ is better than elemental chlorine free.
Better altogether is to radically reduce the need for paper. It helps to make the usage visible and visceral. We calculated for one of our clients, a large attorney firm, how many storeys per attorney they used in paper if you stacked the reams on top of each other, and how many times their skyscraper the office used.
The numbers were so astounding; it led them to redouble their efforts to institute electronic document control. They figured on saving at least $20,000 in the first year. Other attorneys who have done this have found that the paper savings are far outweighed by productivity benefits (no more chasing around the office for files) and retail space (all the floor space devoted to filing cabinets).
Toilet paper. You’d never imagine how uppity people can get about their toilet paper. They assume that recycled toilet paper will chafe. So when a property management firm in Portland, Oregon, decided to switch, they didn’t tell anyone at first. A blissful month went by with no complaints. Then they admitted they’d switched to recycled tissue, and suddenly people complained. The moral to this story: don’t ask; don’t tell.
Paper towels. Certainly you can choose paper towels with a high post-consumer recycled content. You may also want to investigate the ecological trade-offs between towels and hand dryers. Progressive Investment Management decided that it was silly to use trees or electricity to dry your hands. So they provided cotton towels for their small office which one employee was willing to take home once a week to add to her laundry.
Printing. When you print fliers, booklets, posters and the like, use recycled paper and soya based inks whenever possible. You may also want to experiment with tree-free papers. At AXIS Performance Advisors, we sent out our 2003 holiday greetings cards on paper made from kenaf (a lovely herbaceous annual in the mallow family) along with a poorly metered poem that began, ‘Treeless papers may make you laugh, But this was printed on kenaf.’
Resources
(Acessed on April 26, 2013)
Conservatree provides information and sources for environmentally preferable paper, www.conservatree.com.
Break room
One of the visible places to make sustainability real to people is in the break room.
Buying
Energy Star appliances and eliminating disposable cups are two obvious actions. You can also purchase fair trade, shade-grown and/or organic coffee. Leave a few old plastic containers in the cabinets for people to use for their leftovers. Provide recycling or perhaps a worm bin or compost bin for food scraps. (A worm bin produces material with more fertilization value than a compost pile and can easily be kept inside without an odor problem if properly set up. Worm bins don’t need to be turned like a compost pile but do require occasional maintenance to remove the old worm castings – which can be used for your potted plants. You can toss in your used paper towels and old newspapers to provide worm bedding.)
• After a six-month planning process involving a cross-section of the organization, SERA
Architects in Portland, Oregon launched their sustainability efforts by holding a briefing for all employees to discuss their vision for creating fully sustainable buildings.
During the briefing, they presented their plan, educated staff on what sustainability means, recruited their involvement in their various project teams and symbolically handed each person their own set of eating utensils, bought from thrift stores, packaged in lovely carrying cases sewn from the office’s outdated fabric samples.
• Norm Thompson, a US catalogue retailer, targeted the plastic coffee cups their vending machines were spewing out. They approached the vendor to get a machine that would dispense coffee into mugs instead and then issued every employee with a ceramic mug. Eliminating the disposable cups saved Norm Thompson $10,000 a year, not counting the savings in waste disposal.
