613 gogreen week at your company

Your small company decided to do a Go-Green Week
because a lot of you [the employees] have been asking
for it. Every day you will do something green. Your goal
is to have the maximum positive impact for the
environment while also decreasing your expenses.
IN YOUR FIRST MEETING YOU DID SOME
BRAINSTORMING TO SEE THE AREAS
WHERE YOU COULD BE GREENER. YOU
HAVE A LOT OF IDEAS IN THE AIR, AND
SOME OPEN QUESTIONS. DO THE SECOND
MEETING AS FOLLOWS:

BRAINSTORMING FROM FIRST MEETING
1.

Sending out about 1000
emails/day. That’s at
least 1000 printouts/day
at other companies.

2.

Grow our own herb, tomato plants, etc. in the backyard of
company building. Save everyone the trip to the
grocery store. Coffee grinds: a great fertilizer!

How could we encourage
other companies not to
print our emails?

3.

Can we change conventional light bulbs to more
energy efficient ones?

4.

Replace all disposable paper products by 100%
recycled paper products.

5.

Set up carpools, encourage people to
bike, or walk to work.

6.

Switch all office cleaning products
over to eco-friendly ones to eliminate toxins in our
waste water.

How can we incentivize (=motivitate) people?

Pass out individual recycling cans for every desk next.

8.

Cleaners cann’t remember that recyclables go in the
gray dumpster and other trash in the green one.
It’s pointless to recycle if they get this wrong.
We have a giant electricity bill.

One computer left on overnight equals
the use of an entire 60 watt light bulb.
It’s easy to add a "Please consider the
environment before printing this email"
signature to your email accounts.
Printing out internal documents double sided
can reduce the volume of printouts.

Do we have time for gardening?
Sounds great, but can we also
somehow reduce the amount of
printing we do?

7.

9.

Step 1. Use the helpful information
that one of you pulled from the internet
[see below] during the discussion.
Step 2. Decide on one objective for
each working day. Make sure that
everyone is more or less happy with
the decision.
Step 3. Put down the agreed on
agenda on the next page.

We need ideas how we can
help them learn this.

We need ideas how to
consume less electricity.

Little things count a lot. If you are the last
person leaving an office or conference
room, remember to turn off the lights!
Compared to regular bulbs giving the same
amount of visible light, CFLs (Compact
Fluorescents) use less power and have a
longer rated life. In the United States, a CFL
can save over US $30 in electricity costs
over the lamp's lifetime compared to a
regular bulb and save 2000 times its own
weight in greenhouse gases.


Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Incentives:

Looking Toward the Future:
Our Go-Green Week was such a huge success that we will be doing a “Green
Week” once a quarter from here on out. Also, some of the things we did
might be introduced as regular company policies.
Which initiatives from the Go-Green Week should be made mandatory,
do you think?