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OAKLAND, Calif. -- A new United Nations report published this week suggests advisors to institutional investors may end up in court if they ignore environmental and social concerns. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission may reportedly consider whether to force public companies to tell their investors about the financial and physical risks they face from climate change.
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DALLAS, Texas -- By swapping out the lighting on signs in 6,500 of its stores to an LED lighting system from GE, AT&T will save nearly 6 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
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BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- The first phase of a three-phase project to establish a green rating system for all of the products on its shelves, Walmart executives today released its 15 question survey that will be mailed to all of the company's 100,000-plus suppliers.
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Top 8 Ways to Go Green on the Cheap
Sculpture of discarded coffee cups at Yahoo (Click to enlarge.)
Whether you work in a five-person office or 5,000-person factory, there are dozens of initiatives you can implement to reduce waste, use less energy, improve efficiency and get your employees involved in shrinking your company's environmental impacts.
Many of these initiatives don't require a lot of money or time.
Deciding where to begin, however, can be the hardest part. With so many ideas floating around, it can feel overwhelming to decide on the best place to start so we spoke to green business owners and consultants to get their favorite high-impact, low cost and easy-to-implement green initiatives.
Get a Baseline
"You can't reduce what you don't measure first," declares Allison Hannon, Midwestern regional manager for The Climate Group, a non-profit organization that helps companies and governments address global warming issues.
Measuring your carbon footprint may sound too complex to tackle, but there are many easy free tools available that companies can use to get a quick measure of their carbon emissions, says Tommy Linstroth, director of sustainability for Melavar, a sustainable real estate development company based in Savannah, Ga.
He suggests going to Climate Leaders, an EPA program for climate change initiatives that offers greenhouse gas emission tracking tools along with guidance on how to set carbon reduction goals.
"You don't need a dedicated climatologist to do this," Linstroth says. "If you can use an Excel spreadsheet, you can these tools. All you need is information on your gas, electricity and auto usage and it will convert the data for you."
Once you measure your carbon footprint, you can identify the areas with the greatest impact and biggest potential for change. Electricity use and employee commuting may represent the largest impacts and reduction opportunities in an office building, or landfill waste and freight for a factory operation.
"Then you can look for the quick hits -- those initiatives that take the shortest time and have a quick payback," Hannon says, "so people can see the results and get excited about what they are going to do next."
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My personal favorites
Those are all great ideas! I share the air with over 22 million souls down here in sunny southern California. The bulk of the state's 37 million live in the warm regions of the state. We have the ability to impact the carbon footprint BIGTIME. Here's my personal favorites:
1. Ride your bike to work! It's flat, we have lots of bike paths, dust off the trusty bike, put a basket on front, a basket on the back and when you need 3-4 bags of groceries, hope on the ole bike. I ride mine to work almost everyday.
2. Buy a scooter if you don't want to pedal. I ride my automoto when it's dark, or I have to get somewhere faster. They are great-no motorcycle license needed! Covered! 80 miles to the gallon!
3. Business casual? Use your solar dryer religiously. Where I grew up we call that a "clothesline". You will save money, carbon and your clothes. Clothes last longer when they are not subjected to constant tossing and hot temps. I do not own a dryer. I wash 4-5 loads a week, and have for 3 years- down here everything dries in a second!
4. Lunchtime? Grow your own food. Fuel used to ship your food is the worst culprit of all. Grow your tomatoes, your lettuce, your cabbage. EVERYTHING grows here.Buy local always. There are farmers markets everywhere. Ask where everything you buy comes from and save fuel by buying local.
Start your own victory gardens and bring your lunch.
This will help with healthier lifestyles and lowers the packaging waste that enters our landfills.
Clayton Human, VP
Eco Tech Builders Inc.
Titusville. Fl
chuman1@cfl.rr.com
Lighting and recycling
Here are a couple of tips from my experience working in a building of 2,500 employees:
Don't just replace regular lights with CFLs. Look at whether the lights really all need to be on. You may discover, after replacing all your regular lights with CFLs, that only every other one needs to be turned on. In my office, there's a switch at the entrance to each "pod" (which seats about 250 people) that flicks off half the ceiling pot lights. No one seems to mind most of the time (everyone has their own lights in their cubicle) and this saves 1 kwh per hour per pod, or about 2 megawatt hours per year per pod.
Don't publish recycling rates - publish waste rates. Our building publishes monthly reports about how many tons of paper are recycled. The fact is, most of this paper gets recycled because people are printing far too much material. And the paper isn't from recycled sources. They should be printing a report on how much we waste.
Robin from Green Energy Efficient Homes.
The power of postive garbage
Your suggestion of trashing people's parking spaces and walk through a web of waste seems radical. But it makes an interesting point. Initiates don't have to be "pretty" or "upbeat and positive" nor do they have to be "scary" or "intense" to make an impact.
They just have to ENGAGE people.
Kudos.
Jonathan Flaks, M.C.C.
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