It is important to have as many offices using green practices as possible if we are to be serious about saving the earth’s resources.  Even if you are only a small studio such as a web designer there are many easy ways you can achieve sustainability and reduce your carbon footprint. Here are just some of them.

  • Use natural daylight as much as possible by choosing a room with a large window and locating your desk in a way that this can be utilised. Hint: don’t sit with your back to it as that will throw your shadow over your work. Facing the window can give you a glare headache, so sit at an angle.
  • Use a computer monitor that is backlit so there is no light reflection on the screen from the windows.

  • Choose products that suit your output. If you have a lot of printing needs, a printer with a fast output per minute is more sustainable than one that takes forever to print a single page.
  • Use toner save mode or greyscale to save on ink.
  • You may want to look into using a multifunction device to save space in the office. However, not all offices are suited to these. If your office is really busy, you might be better served with a device for each job. No one wants to wait in a queue to get their work done, and if one multifunction machine breaks down, it means everything it does has to come to a stop.
  • Going paperless is another way to save, although it may not be possible to be 100% paperless. If you do copy documents to store online, make sure that storage is encrypted and stored in a cloud based system that has security in place so it cannot be hacked.
  • If you simply store your information on external hard drives, make sure it is done every day and that the hard drives are kept in a different place from your computer, so if fire or flood destroy the building your data won’t all be lost.
  • Turn everything off at the end of the day. Computers should not be left on overnight if no one is going to use them; nor should other devices. Even though your computer may be off, that red light on the monitor still uses power. Plugging them into a power board means you only have one switch to turn off several devices. Turning it all off at the wall or power board will save a lot on running costs.
  • Recycle everything! Paper is the easiest to recycle and you can put down bins next to the rubbish bin to remind staff to use it. Shred the paper first if it is confidential.