As a child it was drilled into our heads with stories and songs that we are supposed to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” We learn to plant trees, turn off lights and water when we’re not using them, and separate the cans and bottles from the regular trash. As we get older, however, many of us think about convenience, time or money. We buy large cases of water bottles so we can conveniently grab one on our way out the door. We throw all our trash in together so we don’t have to walk outside to the recycling bin and we only cut down on electricity when we’ve seen our bill go up higher than we’d like.

Even if you practice good environmental habits regularly, there is a good chance that saving money is your main motivator, which is why you will turn off all your lights before leaving your house. But do you ever go around and turn off all the lights before leaving your office? You don’t because you may not be the last one there and if you’re unsure, does it really matter anyway if the lights are off? It’s not your money you’re wasting, it’s the company’s.

Well, besides the fact that the company having less money means there is less money to put into your paycheck or employee wellbeing, you should be concerned about the environment regardless of how much or how little it is effecting your or anyone else’s wallet.

“Going Green” is overused and we have begun to tune it out without realizing why it is important. To put it simply, we need our natural resources for ourselves and for generations to come so we can’t be selfish and suck them all up right now. Even though you don’t personally pay for the resources in your office, you spend a good portion of your time there. This makes the office an effective and rewarding place to start your environmental efforts. Whether you have authority in the company or not, you can be the driving force that employees need to save resources in your office, not to mention to learn good habits that they can take with them when they go home.
There are many small things you can encourage at your company that overall, will positively contribute to environmental efforts. Every little bit helps and taking on a project you’re passionate about can be very rewarding. So go talk to someone at your company about what you can do to turn your office “green” and at the very least, always remember to “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

That’s how Caterpillar, Inc. just chopped its energy bill by 46% — to save $800,000 a year — by improving the energy efficiency of its headquarters in Peoria, IL. The company’s reduced electricity and natural gas demand translates into credit for reducing GHG emissions.

To do it, Caterpillar redesigned its electrical systems by adding:

• direct digital controls throughout the building to control 800 newly created temperature zones and prevent one-size-fits-all temperatures
• variable-speed fans to the HVAC system
• a seasonal schedule for operating building systems
• motion detectors to turn off lights in unused areas, and
• a night setback to turn off lights and lower office temperatures.

Caterpillar also:

• reduced water use 50% by adding a new irrigation system to minimize landscaping consumption
• developed a green cleaning program to use only environmentally friendly chemicals
• adopted a pest management program that uses the least toxic methods to control insects
• enhanced its recycling program to reduce environmental impacts of materials it uses, and
• conducts regular audits to continuously seek out new waste-reduction opportunities.

Result: Caterpillar’s HQ is the first building in Illinois (outside of Chicago) to earn a gold certification from EPA’s LEED green building program.

Bonus: Wondering how to improve your LEED score?  Consider an online green building education course to learn design, construction, and maintenance techniques used by the pros.

It just takes a bit of planning to create a green office.

That’s how State Farm real estate agent Christine Moscantolo obtained a silver level, green business certification. She worked with Green Impact Solutions, Inc., to identify green products to use when she renovated her office in Allentown, PA.

Once the plan was in place, the transformation into a green office proved to be something that any office in any business setting can adopt. Moscantolo:

• used paints that don’t contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during the renovation of her office
• purchased only computers and appliances that are certified by EPA’s Energy Star program
• selected office plants that eat VOC vapors to help ensure good indoor air quality for employees and customers
• processes half of their insurance policies online, reducing need for paper-based products
• gets customers to file electronic signatures, and
• sends all faxes through email.

Moscantolo’s office is the first State Farm office to win a Green Business Certification from the Green Business League.

Reason: They’re in the latest computer chips inside cash registers. Or if you’re past accepting cash, then the lingo is point-of-sale (POS) terminal.

Companies looking to rack up savings and credits for reducing their carbon footprint can achieve both when they’re ready to upgrade. Just make sure you compare the energy efficiencies of the products you’re considering.

These new POS systems are a whopping 40% more energy efficient than previous models, thanks to huge efficiency leaps made by semiconductor maker Intel, Inc. That translates into 40% cuts in your electricity demand.

For example, Fujitsu America is promoting its upgraded line of POS terminals, the TeamPoS 3000 XL2, which features the latest Intel chips. Fujitsu won a contract to supply shoe and hat retailer, Genesco, Inc., based in Nashville, TN, with its cost-cutting (electricity-wise that is) POS terminals in 1,000 stores.

Since the highly efficient Intel chips produce much less heat than earlier versions, new POS terminals don’t produce nearly as much heat as before, so they don’t need side ventilation. This also lets retailers set up their cash registers in tight spaces.

Genesco says it will not only save money by reducing its electric bill, but it also expects to spend less on maintenance and replacement costs.

Increasingly businesses can expect to see significant gains in energy efficiencies from various computer-based products, especially those that rely on Intel’s chips.

Reason: Intel and all manufacturers with global markets are under tremendous pressure from the European Union (EU) to reduce their direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To the EU, that means not just GHG emissions from Intel’s manufacturing facilities, but from Intel’s entire supply chain as well, from parts suppliers to those using its products.

So, due to the pressures on Intel to green its supply chain, products with Intel chips will increasingly be more and more energy efficient, and businesses that purchase those products will reap the energy savings benefits.

Some of the biggest energy savings for small business operations are right in front of you, but you can’t actually see them.

Reason: They’re in the latest computer chips inside cash registers. Or if you’re past accepting cash, then the lingo is point-of-sale (POS) terminal.

Companies looking to rack up savings and credits for reducing their carbon footprint can achieve both when they’re ready to upgrade. Just make sure you compare the energy efficiencies of the products you’re considering.

These new POS systems are a whopping 40% more energy efficient than previous models, thanks to huge efficiency leaps made by semiconductor maker Intel, Inc. That translates into 40% cuts in your electricity demand.

For example, Fujitsu America is promoting its upgraded line of POS terminals, the TeamPoS 3000 XL2, which features the latest Intel chips. Fujitsu won a contract to supply shoe and hat retailer, Genesco, Inc., based in Nashville, TN, with its cost-cutting (electricity-wise that is) POS terminals in 1,000 stores.

Since the highly efficient Intel chips produce much less heat than earlier versions, new POS terminals don’t produce nearly as much heat as before, so they don’t need side ventilation. This also lets retailers set up their cash registers in tight spaces.

Genesco says it will not only save money by reducing its electric bill, but it also expects to spend less on maintenance and replacement costs.

Increasingly businesses can expect to see significant gains in energy efficiencies from various computer-based products, especially those that rely on Intel’s chips.

Reason: Intel and all manufacturers with global markets are under tremendous pressure from the European Union (EU) to reduce their direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To the EU, that means not just GHG emissions from Intel’s manufacturing facilities, but from Intel’s entire supply chain as well, from parts suppliers to those using its products.

So, due to the pressures on Intel to green its supply chain, products with Intel chips will increasingly be more and more energy efficient, and businesses that purchase those products will reap the energy savings benefits.

Editor’s note: Website hosting is another example of an industry that’s profiting from going green. Many in the industry are taking green web hosting to a new level – and reaping the benefits of a growing customer base along the way. Not only are their data centers running on wind and solar direcly, they are also focusing on efficient data center operations with the latest in high-efficiency hardware and cooling systems.

That’s the lesson from California winery, Jackson Family Wines, home of the Kendall Jackson brand. The company has developed a filtration process that cuts water use 70% and dramatically reduces the vineyard’s demand for electricity to process, heat, clean and transfer water.

After testing this new water filtering and recycling technology, Jackson reduced its water demand by 6 million gallons a year. And with that much less water to process, the winery has reduced power consumption by 9 million kilowatts a year. That’s enough to power 1,300 homes, according to the company’s statement.

Jackson racks up big energy savings because the new filtering process lets it reuse 90% of the water for cleaning wine barrels and tanks and other equipment. The recycled water retains 75% of the heat, so Jackson needs less electricity.

And since Jackson is committed to sustainability, the company made sure that the filtering process also removes organic material that can be composted.

Jackson plans to offer the technology to wineries and other types of companies.

The water-conservation project is just the latest green achievement by the Santa Rosa-based company.

It just installed a new energy-efficient lighting system that is expected to cut electricity bills by $100,000 a year. The new high-intensity, fluorescent lighting system was supplied by General Electric’s Consumer & Industrial division.

The green way is to rent a live Christmas tree for the holidays and then have the tree returned to the environment, alive.

And, the glory of this approach is that you don’t have to do any of the work, you just order the tree and it arrives potted.

After the holidays, the company picks up the tree and bingo, a green Christmas. Your company joins the ranks of those adopting a green office strategy.

Two companies, Evergrow Christmas Trees Co. and Carbonsync Christmas offer the live-tree rental service for about $100 a tree. The trees are returned to nurseries until needed next year. Normally, a tree that takes six to twelve years to grow into a Christmas tree is turned into mulch after a single season.

By renting a live tree and returning it to the nursery, the trees continue to soak up carbon dioxide, so the rental service is yet another way to minimize emissions that create climate change.

In other green Christmas developments, how about running the lights on your tree in a carbon-free manner?

In Copenhagen, home of the big international greenhouse gas emission conference, the city’s Christmas tree lights are powered by pedal power — a team of stationary bicyclists power the tree’s lights.

Like standard merchant service providers, green merchant companies help small businesses set up accounts with banks so they can take credit cards for payment of goods and services.

But these new green merchant companies donate a percentage of their sales or profits to green causes. So, by working with a green merchant service company, your organization becomes greener than you were yesterday by giving a portion of your business to a green company.

For example, Dharma Merchant Services just won Green America’s Green Leadership award during this year’s Green Business Conference in San Francisco.

Dharma donates 10% of its processing profits to a charity of your choice. Like most attending this year’s conference, Dharma is a certified green business, practicing sustainable business methods and concentrating on doing business with other like-minded companies.

And, Dharma, like other green merchant service providers, offers competitive prices, so making a switch to a green service provider can also trim your company’s operating expenses.

You can find other green credit card service providers by contacting the Green Merchant Alliance or searching Green America’s National Green Pages.

Instead of handing your customers and clients oodles of reports, a key green office strategy is to digitize the paper, especially reports, legal documents and catalogs.

Producing reports in a CD format saves trees and shipping costs. A 100-pound package of paper shipped from LA to New York can run you $50. The CD equivalent is only $1.05 via first-class mail, according to E.C. Goggio, president of the digitization company, Mirror Image Media.

Goggio’s Milwaukee-based company promotes his CD services as a clean, green alternative to turning trees into paper. For example:

• Lessiter Publishing Co. saved over 1,000 trees when it produced 1,000 conference guides, materials and catalogs on CD instead of the old paper versions. The company says this eliminates 10 million pieces of paper and the greenhouse gases and other pollutants associated with paper production.
• Ziegler Wealth Management transferred legal documents for 2,000 recipients to CD instead of paper. This eliminated 72,000 pieces of paper, and
• Walter AG put its industrial catalogs on CD and eliminated 25,000 catalogs, which totaled about 7.5 million pages of paper not created.

The everyday CD can hold up to 20,000 letter-sized pages of black and white documents. Using the CD instead of paper eliminates processing of 24 trees.

Plus, storing company documents on CD is a time saver because computers quickly search for the document you need to retrieve. Goggio says that the typical worker spends an average of 150 hours a year looking for lost paper documents. That search can be done instantly with a CD-based retrieval system.

Canon gets green kudos for saving the planet by conserving resources and avoiding use of polluting materials.

Customers who upgrade to the Canon imageRunner Advance series of office equipment can lay a claim to operating a green office thanks to the energy efficiency of the new products — a 75% reduction in power demand, which also reduces creation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

To get to this point, Canon’s touting how it used lifecycle analysis to dramatically cut its environmental footprint. For starters, the product line uses 100% recycled plastic and bioplastics.

Thanks to the lifecycle design approach, Canon’s imageRunner ADVANCE equipment creates 30% fewer GHGs than its predecessor equipment. The new line also reduces:

• use of hazardous substances
• use of metal components
• energy consumption by 75% even in sleep mode
• emissions associated with transportation, and
• use of paper and toner.

To the customer, the advantages are the efficiency gains, as hailed by the printing industry.

Lifecycle analysis led product designers to specifically avoid use of 24 hazardous substances regulated by the European Union, which limits how much lead, cadmium, mercury, flame retardants and other materials can be used in electronics products. Canon’s new Advanced series keeps use of hazardous materials well under the thresholds established by the EU’s RoHS Regulation.