This past January I started working out of my home in a new position with The Nature Conservancy. As I set up my home office on the third floor of my house, I began looking for ways to reduce my impact on the environment.

I didn’t have to look too far. In many ways, working from home is already taking action for the environment. My daily commute consists of walking up two flights of stairs; I rarely use my car these days. And, although my air travel has increased, I take Amtrak to our headquarters in D.C. or to New York for business meetings. My dry cleaning bill is way down and, although my coffee consumption has gone up, I’m doing more to support local businesses.

Ok, so what concrete steps would a green-office manager recommend to reduce my environmental impact? There’s the obvious: buy recycled paper and filing products, print on both sides of the page, and print emails and draft documents only when you must. But finding greener office supplies posed the biggest up-front investment of my time.

The Web turned up some great resources for finding recycled products, including a number of helpful pages from the National Park Service. Digging a bit deeper, I found some useful tips on what the NPS is doing to green its operations, some of which any business would do well to follow. The U.S. General Services Administration has a set of “Smarter Solutions for a Better Environment” that includes products and services like Energy Star and recycled products and safer cleaning and painting supplies -- but only for federal clients.

For the private sector, greenhome.com has a number of solutions and products from recycled Post-Its to paper clips, from recycled computer disks to a “staple-free” stapler. There’s also a PDF of the Energy Star “Green Office Guide.”

There are other green guides, such as the Reactual Institute’s “Efficient Office Supplies,” Greenguide.com from Minnesota, and the University of Colorado’s “ecenter.” All of these offer advice and a variety of products, including equipment like LCD screens and laptops.

On the downside, there appears to be no single, reliable source for "green" furniture. Staples didn’t carry anything worthy of the name, at least not in my local branch. IKEA advertised a desk made from “plantation hardwoods.” It looked serviceable, if a little old fashioned, in the catalog. In the showroom it was revealed to be flimsy, poorly made, and not very professional-looking. It gave the distinct impression that it would disintegrate with the first coffee spill.

As Donella Meadows said, “there's no way to live an ecologically pure life in an industrial society. Compromises are inevitable.” My furniture is not all green and neither are all of my supplies. I’ll continue to fly because the programs I’m working with are global. I’m taking baby steps, but there’s some real potential for businesses large and small to make a difference. It will become easier to find green supplies as demand increases.

In the meantime, I’ll keep making my small steps. Two final things I hope to tackle in the future for my home office: lighting and carpeting. I’ve only begun my research into these two, but two resources have already come across my desk. Flor, a do-it-yourself modular flooring catalog distributed by Interface, the company founder Ray Anderson (no relation) pledged will never make a carpet from raw materials again and naturallighting.com.

For now, I’m left with a handful of useful sites to guide my purchases -- and a renewed appreciation for the green-office manager.

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Scott Edward Anderson writes as “The Green Skeptic” and provides resources for The Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine, Freshwater, and Fire Initiatives from his home office in Philadelphia, Penn.