The Greening of Gavin

Zero Footprint Week – Office

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Today’s theme is the Office and how we can reduce our carbon footprint where we spend a fair bit of time. 

I work in on the 30th Floor of an office tower in the central business district of Melbourne, Victoria, so I have quite a few suggestions for this theme.  I see resources wasted  every day where I work, because people are very nonchalant about environmental issues.  A few people practice green principles at home, but most (not all) seem to fit the usual mould of a conspicuous consumer by using as many resources as possible, because they don’t have to pay for them!  Anyway, enough of a rant for now, here are the three tips from the Zero Footprint Week site for today with my personal experiences thrown in for good measure!

Switch off!   Not your brains at work, the appliances like PC’s, printers, photocopiers, and lights.  In the same way you turn electrical items off in your home, please do so at the office (this includes the home office for those that work at home).  Treating your office appliances just as you would those in the home can greatly reduce your office’s energy consumption and carbon emissions. 

By turning off PC’s at night and then taking the next step by switching them off at the wall to prevent standby power, goes a long way to reducing consumption.  That includes all peripherals like your monitor as well.  With at least 70 computers on a typical city office floor, that is huge saving that can be made by simply switching things off at night. 

Lights are another big one.  How many times have you driven past a city late at night and seen office blocks lit up like a Christmas tree.  From experience, no one works that late, and usually it is sheer laziness that has prevented these lights from being turned off.  Same goes for empty bathrooms and meeting rooms.  I am forever turning off the lights in vacant meeting rooms when I walk around the floor yet there are signs everywhere asking people to turn off the lights as they leave the room.  Once again, care factor zero. 

By implementing a responsible energy usage policy, your business can save as much as 20% on its monthly energy bills.

Starting or revitalising and office recycling program.  My office goes through hundreds of kilograms of paper each month.  Reams of paper disappear faster than a cold meat pie and a warm beer at a footy final.  I sit no more than 3 metres from a printer when at work, and I actually see queues forming during the day to collect printouts.  Surely people don’t need to print that much, At least the default setting on the printer is to print on both sides of the sheet.  This is a simple solution for those paper junkies.

There is hope at our office.  We have recycling bins for office paper, cans/bottles/plastic, and some floors have organic waste collections which is great.  Now if we can only get people to throw the right waste in the right bin we would actually get somewhere!  By reducing paper and organising an office recycling program you can reduce your carbon footprint at work considerably.  If you already have a reduction and recycling program, get behind it, and energise those around you to do so.  What do you think they make recycled toilet paper from?  Nice, white, recycled office paper, that’s what.  No bum is that special that it needs virgin paper to be wiped on it!  Recycle your used office paper and save our old growth forests from being felled. 

Measuring, offsetting and reducing carbon footprints.  Many businesses will be aware of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that will be implemented by the Commonwealth Government in 2010, but not many will know what it means to them.  Well basically the more you pollute, the more you pay for the privilege.  The first step is to take an audit of your businesses carbon emissions.  If you don’t know how, take a course on Carbon Accounting.  It will serve your business well in the near future.  Once your footprint is determined/calculated, you and your fellow co-workers can set policies in place to reduce it or offset it.  By acting early, your business can be saved from the last minute scramble for green resources in 2010 when the mandatory CPRS goes into effect.  If you are interested in starting a green career, now is one of the best times to begin acquiring the skills that will be required for the future.

To find your office’s environmental footprint and more tips on how you can best improve it, please visit the EPA Victoria’s office footprint calculator.  It is a great place to begin to see what area needs to be tackled first.

Tomorrows post will be about Energy, and how you can reduce your carbon footprint in this area.  At last, my favourite subject!

Keep an eye on the official Zero Footprint Week web site for more tips on how to reduce your carbon footprint during the week.

Seriously Saving Money

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Now that we have managed to collectively talk ourselves into a recession, I thought it would be a good time to post some serious money saving tips. I write this in honour of my son Adam, who on Monday was made redundant from the Reject Shop. To his credit, he has four I.T. job interviews in the next two days. Well done Son!
This list is a collection that I have been adding to over the past couple of months, and there are one or two that I don’t subscribe to, like the #16. The rest are very sound advice in these troubled times and most also help you to reduce your carbon footprint.
1. Be a one-car or no-car family.
2. Get rid of your mobile phone. Don’t just lower your plan, get rid of your phone altogether. Don’t buy phones for your children. Make them buy their own on pre-paid. They will soon appreciate the true value of money.
3. For your home phone, cut call waiting, long distance, caller id. These are not needs unless they are provided free of charge.
4. Get rid of your cable/satellite TV. This will also save you electricity and give you 15 or more hours a week of spare time and about $50 or more a month back into your pocket.
5. Stop eating out. Take lunch to work with you.
6. Cook from scratch.
7. Drink water from the tap.
8. Grow as much food as possible on your property.
9. Buy used clothing. Use hand-me downs.
10. Mend your clothes.
11. Stop shopping. Only go to the shop when absolutely necessary. Try to limit your shopping to once every two weeks. Buy enough so that you don’t have to go more than that. Don’t ever run to the shop for just one thing.
12. Buy generic. Get the no-name brand food and generic brand medicine.
13. Eat less expensive foods, try: potatoes, beans, rice, soups
14. Turn your thermostat to 25C in the summer, and to 18C (or less) in the winter. Use a fan in summer and put on another layer in winter.
15. Learn to make things instead of buying them.
16. Get rid of your pets (extreme I know), unless they are a food source (chickens, goats, pigs, cows).
17. Cut hair at home. For the price of some clippers and some good scissors, you will have paid for your clippers in two or three haircuts. (Ever wondered why my hair is so short, my clippers are well used!)
18. Use the real thing instead of disposable.
19. Dry you clothes outside on the line, or on a clothes airer.
20. Turn off appliances and lights when not in use. You should be able to reduce your energy bill by at least 50% with a bit of effort.
Most of them are simple and easy to achieve, but all take will power and behavioural changes.
Good luck, we will all need to tighten our belts soon enough.

Zero Footprint Week – Home

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So what can you do around the home to lower your carbon footprint? Both home owners and renters alike can do simple things to reduce their CO2e emissions. So, today from the Zero Footprint Week site are the three categories or challenges if you like, with my own tales of how I did it.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle. By recycling just 20% more saves money on rubbish rates. That is straight from the site, but what do they mean? Well I have a perfect example. Two years ago, I used to have three wheelie bins. One 120 litre landfill bin, one 240 litre Recycling Bin, and one 240 litre Green waste bin. Due to a lot of composting and vermiculture, I no longer needed the green waste bin so in June this year we returned it to the council and we now pay $57 less in waste rates. I believe that if we keep it up, we should be able to change out the 120 litre landfill bin to an 80 litre size, which would then reduce our waste costs by another $21 a year.

Now saving money on rates is not the only reason why you should try and use the 3R’s. By reducing consumption and therefore waste, you generate far less packaging waste, and save dollars by not buying stuff. Reusing items like ice-cream containers for storage, jars for preserving, and soft drink bottles for homebrewing for instance, you can saving on having to buy brand new items for these purposes. For more information on recycling visit the Visy Recycling Project. Or have a look at one of my past posts called “Eco House Challenge – Waste“.

Borrow, Swap or Buy Second Hand. How many drills, hammers or shovels do we really need in this world? How many DVD’s are purchased each week, and just sit on a shelf only and have only been watched once (guilty as charged sir). Instead of buying something that you might only use once, see if a friend has what you require and borrow or swap for what you need. Hiring a movie at your local Video Store is much better than buying a copy and you rid the world of another piece of landfill that takes thousands of years to break down. Go and visit your local opportunity shop (Vinnies or Salvos), and browse for a while. It is amazing what you can find. I personally have found many fowler-vacola jars for my preserving kit as at least 90% discount. I have even bought a pair of house jeans (Levi’s) that are still in nick that I wear when gardening. They cost me $20 and were a bargain. Imagine how much money you could save just by buying second hand stuff for a month!

Insulate Your Home. Now all you renters don’t switch off. There are simple things that you can do as well. Ever heard of draft proofing. Remember that door snake or draft sausage that your Nana used to have at the front and back door. They were used to keep a cold draft out, and guess what, they still work today. Two bits of long, thin material filled with wheat or sand. Bung it up against the bottom of the door and you stop the cold air getting in. If anyone has written a post about making a door sausage, please share a link in a comment. I am sure those handy with a sewing machine could whip one up.

If you are a home owner, fit a draft stopper on the outside of the door that seals when the door closes. I have also fitted rubber strips around the front and back door frames that seal tight upon closing. Check anything that opens to the outside for drafts. I use an smoking incense stick to detect drafts. It works a treat. The smoke moves (other than upward of course) when there is a breeze. You can use the same type of rubber strips for windows as well.

Another item that most people miss are exhaust fans. Most exhaust fans are installed straight into the ceiling without anything preventing the hot or cold air from entering your living space from the roof cavity. Shut your bathroom doors on a hot day, and you will notice the difference! You can also buy a device called a Draftstoppa which seals the vent when you turn it off, or do what I did and simply wrap the cover/filter of the exhaust fan with aluminium foil for the summer (it was one we didn’t use in the kitchen). Make sure you tape over the switch so that no one burns out the motor by turning it on accidentally. Last summer we notice that we did not need to use the air-conditioner half as much, and saved at least 20-30% on our cooling bill for the season.

If you do own your home, then make sure that your have insulation in the roof space with a high R value. The higher the better. We have cellulose loose blown insulation (made from pulped wastepaper and mixed with borax and boric acid to make it fire proof) in our roof cavity, which was cheap and has a good R value.

With all these measures in place, and with your doors and windows shut early in the morning, you will have no problem keeping your house cool in the summer and warm in the winter and you will save swags of money in electricity, natural gas, wood, or heating oil.

Tomorrows post will be about how you can reduce your carbon footprint at the Office.

Keep an eye on the official Zero Footprint Week web site for more tips on how to reduce your carbon footprint during the week.