Hey everyone,

Our company recently started composting our organic waste in the office, and it got me thinking about other green office practices. My latest thoughts have centered around energy use in the office and I came up with some other items. Please feel free to add your own suggestions about being green at the office.

• Turn off lights and fans that are not being used.

• Watch your thermostat settings and make sure they work for you. Many thermostats can be programmed to automatically adjust the temperature to a comfortable level so you are not fiddling with it. But turn off the thermostat completely on the weekends. No sense heating and cooling when no one is there!

• Have your computer go into energy-saving standby mode after it's been idle for a little bit.

• When you are done for the day, make sure to turn off any and all computers and appliances that do not need to be on 24 x7.

• Turn off your computer at the end of the day. The exceptions are if a server needs to be on 24×7, or if your backup script runs at night. Note that most backup programs can turn off your computer after it's backed up your data. Or, you can configure your computer to backup during the day without interrupting your work, so then you can shut down at night. If you do back up at night, make sure your backup software can wake your computer up from standby. You computer uses less energy in standby mode.

• Turn off your monitor at the end of the day.

• Turn off heating / air conditioning at night.

• Turn off computer speakers, iPod chargers, local printers, etc. at the end of the day.

• Your components draw a small amount of power even when they are turned off if they are plugged in. The easiest way to prevent this is to turn off your power strip at the end of the day.

• Turn off printers & copiers on the weekends.

• Replace standard light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs.

• Use rechargeable batteries.

• Recycle / donate your electronic components, including old cell phones. There are lots of computer donation centers and charities that can get more life out of your old components.

• Recycle your toner cartridges, and buy recycled toner when you can.

• Reduce margins on paper, don't print more than you need to (do a Print Preview and see if you really need to print all pages, if you are printing from a browser you can often reduce the size of the text to make it fit on less pages), print in-house materials on paper that has already been printed on one side.

• Put your printer into "toner save" mode.

• Recycle everything you can.

• Use Craig's List and Freecycle to obtain furniture instead of buying new stuff.

• Start a company car pool program.

• Encourage public transportation and biking to work.

• Use a water filter instead of bottle water.

That's just a start! What ideas do you have?

Also, there have been a couple of other articles/blogs on this issue:

Ideal Bites Greener Office Tips

Socially Responsible Office Practices

_{(I am a World of Good, Inc. employee, but these opinions are my own.)}