Going Green to Preserve our Precious Planet

Over the holiday break, I took my six-year-old to ZooLights — an amazing specta­cle of nearly 1.25 million lights hung through­out the Oregon Zoo. Thankfully, it was greener than ever this year because nearly 2/3 of the festival’s bulbs have been replaced with energy-efficient LEDs. Patrons were even enticed to make the switch by getting free fudge in exchange for their old power-sucking holiday lights. Sweet!

Anyway, my zoo trek reminded me that we all can — and must — do our part to preserve the precious planet that we share with all its amazing, color­ful, and playful inhab­i­tants (my daugh­ter included).

Climbing ocelots need healthy tree limbs to pounce from. Waddling penguins need solid ice to slide on. Silly sea otters need healthy clams to crack. And my daugh­ter (who contributed to this post) needs to marvel at these creatures’ splen­dor for years to come … and so do her children.

So what simple changes can we all make in the workplace to reduce our collec­tive footprint — even if  you’re not a “green business”? Here are some things we’re doing. Please comment below and let us know what you’re up to.

• Ship using UPS’s carbon neutral program
• Go paper­less — ask vendors to invoice electron­i­cally; get all your state­ments online
• Invest in a duplex printer — when you must print, at least you’re using both sides of the paper
• Recycle used toner cartridges — most manufac­tur­ers have a program to ship them back for free
• Get energy-efficient office equip­ment — print­ers and PCs that automat­i­cally sleep when not in use
• Use CFL light­bulbs — they use only about 1/10 the power of incan­des­cent bulbs
• Host online meetings and confer­ence calls in lieu of travel­ing (when you can)
• Go green with website hosting — options are avail­able to not serve up content when site is idle
• And there’s count­less things to do at home — even my daugh­ter knows when raspberry season is!

I’ll leave you with this to ponder:

“Analyses of air contained in ice from the Antarctic ice cap show that there is far more CO₂ in the air today than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”  -United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction