Is your employer doing their best to help the environment?
How green are your employers? Do they think of the impact their business is having on our environment? I’m sure most businesses recycle their waste nowadays but what about other things that are not so obvious? Have a read and see 🙂
Waste Management
My current workplace do a fairly good job at managing waste. We have different bins to collect recyclable waste, confidential waste and landfill waste. We have only been given these three types of bins so we currently are unable to split it up any further as paper, cardboard and plastic all go into the recyclable bin together, confidential information into the confidential bin and everything else goes into landfill including food waste.
My previous workplace was excellent at their waste management as they had a whole yard full of sections to put different types of waste. This workplace was much bigger and had much more waste and much more different types of waste to deal with. Their sections were cardboard, plastic, polystyrene, landfill, crockery, garden waste, lightbulbs and metal.
How does your workplace compare? I imagine depending on the workplace the amount of recycling bins and the amount of waste will differ but if every single workplace aimed to be the best they could at recycling waste properly it would reduce the amount of waste going into landfill every year.
Electricity
Are you ever at work and every single light in every office is on no matter if there’s someone in the room or not? This is such a waste of electricity! At my work the lights are on a sensor and if there is no movement in the area within 15 minutes the lights go out. This is a genius idea for workplaces as many people will not care about switching off lights if they are not paying the bills. I have also seen labels on light switches saying ‘SWITCH IT OFF’. This is good instead of having to have sensors fitted. It’s maybe not as effective but will hopefully remind people to switch the light off when leaving the room.
Heat Loss
At my previous job we had a huge warehouse shutter which was left open from 8am until 10pm until someone decided it was causing so much heat loss for the whole place something had to change. It was important to get in and out frequently but it could be put up and down quite easily so was decided it would be kept down for as much as possible. Even when the shutter needed to be open for a longer amount of time it was not opened to maximum capacity. It was only opened to the height of the tallest member of staff to walk through safely as this reduced the amount of heat loss to the workplace dramatically.
With just some small changes employers can help the environment as well as saving themselves money. If there are suggestion boxes at your work why not give some of these tips –
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Recycle in correct bins / request additional bins
Reuse the back of paper going in the bin for notes or telephone messages
Don’t print out pages you don’t need
Switch off lights when leaving a room (and computers at the end of the day)
Close external doors to keep the heat in
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Wondering how to get your employers interested? Here’s a link to a great training course for them and it’s free!!
http://www.resourceefficientscotland.com/resource/green-champions-training
If you’re a community group then Greener Kirkcaldy can offer a free energy audit for your building to help you identify how to keep your bills under control. Just contact us on 01592 858458, or info@greenerkirkcaldy.org.uk.
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