Embracing Kingdom Hope for a Broken World
Green Office
Green Office: Printing
May 5th
Green Office: a series in which we invite you into our adventures to try to do business in a way that better cares for creation.
Green Office: Printing
As I’ve said before, it’s not always easy being an organization that promotes caring for creation. You see, it’s not enough to just promote the theology of creation care, we have to embody it as well. Sometimes this is an easy switch, other times it takes a lot more work. Regardless, it is a new adventure discovering how to do business in a green way. So, we have decided to bring you into our journey to care for God’s creation in our organization as well. With this post we are launching the Green Office series, a sub-series under the Green Adventures series.
Here are a few of the things that we’ve done to employ green practices in our organization to date:
- We brought in a few indoor plants to clean the toxins from the office air. I put in a little peace lily, a red-edged dracaena, and (what I am pretty sure is) a Warneck dracaena. The Warneck dracaena was given to me which is why I’m not exactly sure of the name. It’s nice to know that these little friends are hard at work keeping our air clean.
- We aggressively turn off the lights in the office. We ensure that they are never on when we are no one is working inside. We also make use of natural light through a very large window we have. In fact, most of the day (unless really needing the extra light) the lights are off even when someone is working inside.
- Similarly, we employ very strong power-saving techniques on computers. They are set to the following settings: monitor off after 2 minutes of inactivity and PC to sleep after 10. Additionally, the surge protector is shut off after the computer’s powered down each night.
- I recently shared about my quest to make the most creation-friendly business cards I possibly could. While I am still working towards a better ink, we are very happy with the results. I now have a variety of people collecting all sorts of odd packaging for me to use for business cards.
I will share others in future posts. For now, we turn our attention to printing.
I am excited to say that this is one of those places where we have been incredibly successful to date. In fact, since moving into our new office about 6 weeks ago, we have yet to print a single piece of paper. In order to do so we have really questioned at every instance if things needed to be printed. To date I have not found reason to do so. Certainly the day will come, but we are happy about that for now. When the time comes to begin printing, I will definitely be using eco font or other ink-saving technique.
Of course, I realize that each industry and job is different and it might be more difficult for some of you. I just encourage you to think hard before clicking “print” and consider the subsequent tips we have discovered when you do. Note that I have also relied heavily on email and file sharing to enable this.
Another key thing we have done is that I picked up a ream of recycled paper from Staples. I searched a variety of stores before I was able to find their 100% recycled paper. Many of the office supply stores offer partially recycled paper, but I was really excited to find fully recycled paper. The nice thing was that it did not come at a steep price increase. While it still takes energy and other resources to process, it is at least nice that it does not use any more trees. I was shocked to discover from their packaging that, “the average American uses more than 655 pounds of paper every year.” Yikes!
Another way we save paper is to reuse the reverse side of old or mistaken print jobs. I often write or print (back when I last printed something) on the backside of previous print jobs. So, I have client and marketing notes written on the back of an old copy of our business plan. The funny – or strange – thing is that I have taken to collecting other peoples mistaken print jobs, junk mail, and other paper waste to use for my work. Odd, but effective nevertheless.
Finally, we are recycling all print cartridges. We have been doing this already as we have recycled cartridges from others. This is a great way to earn rewards, get discounts, or get free reams of paper as well. It is important that these be recycled. You can take them back to most office supply stores and several other places.
As you can see, our journey to green our office has taken us many places. We are excited about these steps that we have listed here and look for to sharing others that we have already implemented and even more that we have have yet to experience. Please continue to follow our journey to care for God’s creation in life and in the office.
