How to be more eco-friendly in your work office

As well as saving the earth one step at a time, being more environmentally-conscious in the workplace can improve efficiency and save your business money too.

Follow these three steps to making your office that little bit greener:

Recycled office supplies

It’s not as hard as it seems to change suppliers for the odd few bits. Making a few small changes can make all the difference – so why not start with like-for-like exchanges like using recycled paper, envelopes or post its?

To save you searching round the bigger brands, The Green Office stocks all manner of eco-friendly office supplies, including recycled paper if you’re looking for somewhere to get started.

Switch off your PC

You may be forgiven for receiving some funny looks from your workforce if you ask them to ‘switch off’ this lunchtime, but it does the environment the world of good.

Encourage them to do the same when they leave for the evening and you’ll find that switching just one monitor off overnight for one year will save enough energy to print 800 A4 pages on a laser printer. If you only use your PCs during the eight-hour workday, it will cost only £15 per year to run.

Office workout

Healthy eating is contagious in many workplaces. Open a box of chocolates and they’ll all want one, and as soon as one person is on a health-kick, the trend soon catches on.

We all know that squeezing at least 30 minutes of exercise into the busy working day can be a large ask, so why not combine increasing your heart rate with getting one of your five a day in one fell swoop?

Investing in an exercise bike juicer means your staff get rewarded with a luscious smoothie or a fruity juice as they pedal – if that’s not an incentive then I don’t know what is! Either way, it’s a great excuse to reduce your energy costs and keep your staff in shape.

Getting to work

Even if you drive to the office, there are more eco-friendly ways of getting around – such as car sharing.

Encouraging your staff to get their environmental caps on before they even reach the office has money saving – as well as planet-saving – benefits.

Sites such as CarShare let drivers and passengers search by postcode for where you’re going from and to. So even if no one in your office lives nearby, there could be someone working in the building next to you that lives around the corner.