Five Ways to Create a Sustainable Office
1. Sign up for Sustainable Office Practices
Sustainable Office Practices is the Office of Sustainability’s free class on how to save energy, paper, money, and time through easy steps to green your office. Click here for more details and register through eNDeavor. Download the Green Guide, the comprehensive guide to sustainable office practices at Notre Dame, and share it with your colleagues.
2. Reduce your paper footprint
Memos, reports, campus-wide announcements, forms, and surveys can all be distributed electronically, saving trees, money, and time. See page 4 of the Green Guide for guidelines on how to address different communications needs electronically. Also, if you set the computers and copiers in your office to print double-sided automatically, it saves time for everyone and cuts down on paper use.
3. Purchase responsibly
Buy remanufactured toner cartridges, rechargeable batteries, recycled copier paper, and Energy Star computers and appliances.
4. Set your computer to Stand By or Hibernate when not in use.
While your computer goes into Stand By or Hibernation, it uses only 1-2% as much energy as when it is on, it starts up quickly, and it goes right back to what you were doing last. Instructions are on page 2 of the Green Guide.
5. Recycle and ban the bottle
Single stream recycling means it all goes in one bin: all types of paper, plastic, glass, styrofoam, aluminum, and cardboard. Containers don’t need to be rinsed, either. Spread the word in your office about how easy it is to recycle. If you need more bins, email recycle@nd.edu.
Individual water bottles take so much energy to produce it’s equivalent to filling each bottle a quarter of the way with oil. Plus, they cost abut 75% more than a water cooler. So talk to your co-workers about making your office bottle-free. Try renting a water cooler and purchasing some mugs for the office, or reduce costs even further by purchasing a Brita.
