Our company is trying to go green. No big news there really. There's a big push nowadays for companies and individuals to try and lessen their carbon footprint and work on the new Three R's, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. In some aspects we're actually succeeding in being a little more environmentally conscious. After all, we're supposed to have massively reduced the number of business trips we make (and being an international company that's a big cut), we're cutting down on the number of printouts we make, and we're actually starting to recycle more within the office. It's a nice touch, really, it is. But a closer look tells me we're not as green as we'd like to think we are...
Water Usage
We've got that latest and greatest in the restrooms when it comes to combining technology and the restroom. Low flush toilets are great, especially when combined with motion activated flushing. It's green and sanitary too. But then there's the sinks. Sure, they're also motion activated, so you'd think they wouldn't waste water. Well... Sorta... Instead of just turning on when you put your hands under the faucet and turning off when you're done these sinks are on motion activated timers. Stick your hands underneath to turn it on. You get a ten second burst of water. It's not enough to was and rinse in one cycle, so you've got to move your hands out of the sink and put them back in. Of course, now you've only taken four seconds to finish rinsing your hands, that leaves the water still running until you make it over to the paper towels, wasting six seconds of water while you're at it. Better still is that some of the toilets and sinks are not set up very well, so just walking by turns them on. Nice going guys. The amount of water you waste on all the floors of the building all day could probably water my lawn at home.
Coffee Waste
What office doesn't have coffee? I don't know of one unless you count any non-profit, anti-caffiene organizations out there, but do they really count? Seriously though, coffee is an office staple. Coffee can even be a relatively green coffee staple if you think about it. All you need are a few employees who are willing to take the used grounds (and even coffee filters) home to compost or spread around their rose gardens. That's a lot of coffee grounds which are now out of the land fill and biodegrading naturally while they help beautify their surroundings. That only works well though if you have a traditional coffee maker. To make the employees happy we ended up losing our regular coffee makers and they have all been replaced with Flavia machines. Sure, the flavor options are nice, but what about how it's all made? Individual coffee packets, that's how. Individual packets that are wrapped in plastic and will end up sitting in a landfill for the next millennia. Of course, some of the fancier drinks take more than one flavor packet too, so that just adds to the mess. The used coffee and tea isn't even separated out at the end of the brew cycle to even give the option for employees to use the grounds for other uses.
Reduce Your Paper Usage
We don't print as much as we used to, and that's a good thing. But what about those paper cups we've been asked to cut down on? Remember the Flavia coffee machine I just mentioned? Guess what's next to it? You guessed it, stacks and stacks of paper coffee cups. Better still is that most people use a new one every time they want more coffee. As if that's not bad enough, just turn around in the break room and take a gander over at what the company thinks is another nice perk for it's employees: a popcorn machine (I guess they were tired of complaints of people burning popcorn in the microwave, so now we have a full sized popcorn machine to scorch things). Maybe I'm being a little picky here, but all the popcorn is available to be served in are those little popcorn bags. Once you put greasy popcorn in them, you can't really recycle them. Granted, I'm not really sure what else you could put the popcorn in (other than those tiny little paper coffee cups) but I still find it humorous that we're trying to reduce paper usage and yet keep giving us little choice of things to use in the break room other than paper products.
Emissions
Let's reduce our carbon foot print by reducing the number of times we fly anywhere, and let's encourage the use of VOIP and video conferencing so that we can still work face to face with our colleagues in other countries. That's all well and good, but there's another side to reducing emissions, and that's not driving. There are still enough member of senior management who want to see their employees in the office on a daily basis with very little exceptions. I know I'm not the only one who drives over 60 miles round trip on a daily basis. If we could be allowed to work from home one day a week, think of the pollution we wouldn't put into the atmosphere (not to mention what employees would save on gas). Also, by requiring everyone to be in the office every day we're actually running out of parking spaces, so we're wasting even more fuel idling around the parking lot for upwards of five minutes on a daily basis just trying to find a spot to park. Plant a tree for me guys, because I'm still circling for a place to park on campus.
Don't get me wrong, I like that we're finally trying to go green here, but sometimes I think we're not thinking things all the way through.
