Shin, I'm not so sure. Say you're renting office space from a building. Your lease terms include a utility charge that's rated based on a ratio between square footage rented by you to the total. Say you only generate 15% of the total electricity bill each month. Even if this costs you something like 10k, let's assume you then cut your usage by 10%. So whereas you had .15x = 10k charge, you've now got .15x-.15(.1)x = .1485x. Your total savings is trivial.

Take into the cost of implementing a cultural transformation in your employees in order to achieve that reduction in usage. Even if it's sending out an email every month, the time lost in either developing an automatic process, or otherwise conveying the message with sufficient impact to effect any change would be offset by negligible gains.

Either way you're talking about such small amounts of money, the entire exercise becomes trivial.

I'll go with you on paper, insofar as I think it's easier to move the needle on office supplies, so you'd see a greater return, especially if you do a lot of copying, etc.

I still think ultimately though that going green doesn't save enough to be worth the effort and cost of enforcing a policy.

But if everyone in the building cuts their energy use by 10% the savings mount up and I find it hard to believe it would cost that much to remind people to turn the lights out once in a while.

Also, whilst on an individual level the energy savings would be trivial, once you extrapolate it out to every business in your entire country, the energy saving would be collossal. I think a lot of the problem with green issues, especially in America is that people entirely fail to see the big picture. Thinking along the lines of "How much difference will it make if I turn my computer off over night" needs to be replaced with "How much difference would it make if everyone turned off their computers over night", the answer being, a fuckload.

only when the epa is looking over the shoulder, otherwise... its a non issue.

not speaking of paper trash or water, but items from an industrial setting

people just dont seem to care as long as product goes out