Has global warming changed your work situation?

Originally Posted by Sassafrass

Like nutty said, whether or not global warming exists or whatever, it REALLY doesn't hurt to make efforts to be more green.

I honest-to-goodness try at my work. There aren't many employees, and I bet you people can guess who wastes the most in the office.

I am constantly turning off faucets that are left dripping in both the bathroom and in the kitchen area. Perpetually turning off lights that are left blazing in empty rooms for no good reason.

I try to re-use backsides of paper (chopped in quarters) for notes instead of using too many post-its or throwing out paper and things like that. We don't have a paper recycling program in town, so it's up to us to do it.

The stupid thing is, fuck being green, that's just good business sense. Why waste energy and paper and water that you have to pay for? It's in the interests of management to encourage people not to be wasteful. Over here, getting recyclables taken away is cheaper than standard rubbish too (In Brighton at any rate) so most companies recycle everything.

The office I used to work in was a relatively new building. All the lights were on motion sensors so turned off when nobody was around. Water was heated by solar collectors on the roof for the main part and the building was designed to be very energy efficient so far as air con and heating went. My new place isn't quite so green but we turn everything off that we're not using, to save money as much as anything else. More profits = bigger bonuses so every little helps.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Radez29

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.