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.

Don’t ask for plastic, that’s for sure. It’s what got the first of many normal Americans arrested by the Green Police in the spoofy Superbowl ad for the 2010 Audio A3 TDI. Its special green feature: clean diesel power.

It actually took a long time to get to the point about the greeniness of diesel in the ad. But it was a fun wait, as the Audi Green Police systematically bring the Tea Party’s worst nightmare to life –  hordes of socialist green police arresting unwary Americans in the act of not-being green. Was easy to picture Al Gore directing this gem of a commercial.

First a guy gets knocked down and cuffed for asking for a plastic grocery bag, “Ya picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy!” growls the burly green cop.

Then backed by a 1980′s style rock ballad extolling the virtues of the green, you see shots of:

• police discovering a battery that was in the trash instead of being recycled
• a helicopter putting a spotlight on a homeowner committing a “compost infraction” for putting his orange peel in the garbage disposal
• the arrest of a home owner for using incandescent light bulbs
• a couple being harassed for heating their hot tub to 105 degrees, and
• a cop scolding two teenagers as he empties their plastic water bottles.

Then, finally, in a traffic roadblock to check on all sorts of anti-green driving, the Green Police let the driver of the Audi A3 TDI out of the backup and scoot him on his way because he’s driving a clean diesel car. “You’re good to go, sir!”

By upgrading to energy-efficient lighting systems in all of its retail stores, auto parts and tire seller Canadian Tire says the $12 million savings it’ll reap in 2010 are just the beginning.

The more efficient lighting systems saved the company’s stores more than 45 million kilowatt hours (kwhs) of energy in 2009 and will expand this savings to more than 85 million kwhs in 2010 and beyond.

The lighting upgrades are also improving the company’s environmental footprint by cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 11,500 tons in 2009 and 20,500 tons in 2010.

But this is just the opening stage of a campaign to boost the company’s bottom line by chopping energy costs. For example, Canadian Tire is building so-called smart stores that are 30% more energy efficient than standard stores built just three years ago. The mix in a smart store includes:

• florescent lighting
• Energy Star approved products
• daylight harvesting
• motion sensors to turn off lights in unused areas
• high efficiency heating and cooling systems, and
• increased insulation.

Full details are reviewed in the company’s first-ever Community and Business Sustainability Report.

The school expects to save $500,000 a year in lower electricity bills thanks to newly installed software that maximizes energy efficiency of a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system at its Austin, TX, campus.

That’s a lot of green credit thanks to the significant emission reductions that come with the upgrade, which the school says is well worth the one-year return on investment to install the software from Optimum Energy, LLC.

The design cuts power demand by six million kilowatts, which in turn reduces the university’s indirect greenhouse gas and conventional air pollutants generated by its electrical suppliers.

The energy-optimization software can be used in a variety of building applications, including:

• office towers
• schools and universities
• government facilities
• data centers
• laboratories
• medical facilities
• airports
• hotels
• casinos, and
• shopping centers.

The OptimumHVAC software runs controllers provided by Johnson Controls to operate the university’s first, 100% variable-speed drive HVAC system.

Adding green ways to manage stormwater will save companies money.

Doing nothing and sticking with the status quo — letting stormwater run into storm drains — is the losing proposition. It’s going to cost companies a lot more to rely on this old way of handling stormwater.

The 79,000 businesses in Philadelphia are bracing for huge new water utility fees, and some will be hit really hard — up to $10,000 a month more for large operations like an airport, according to a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But many more companies stand to see cuts in their water utility bills, especially those that can reduce the amount of impervious surfaces on their property, mainly parking lots and roofs. These winners range from chemical companies to hospitals and commercial buildings.

The key to cutting water bills: using low-impact development (LID) designs and other green infrastructure to capture all your stormwater on your property (away from buildings), keeping it out of a storm drain and letting the soil do the treatment work on your property.

To encourage businesses to use green solutions to manage stormwater, the city will base fees on the amount of  impervious surface at a facility. The more a company does to reduce the impervious surface, the smaller the fee.

Some of the green solutions to cutting your water utility fees include adding:

• rain gardens on your property, including in a parking lot
• green rooftops, which not only capture stormwater, but help cut heating and cooling bills, and
• porous pavements for parking lots.

Most cities are spending billions on giant underground concrete vaults to store runoff and treat it after a storm passes.

But Philadelphia has adopted a different approach, one that EPA favors, designing stormwater controls that mimic nature’s way of absorbing most stormwater. For example, hardly any stormwater leaves a forest. It generally percolates into the soil where it falls.

A handful of towns were expecting clean, green renewable power from their new wind turbine installations this winter. However, it ain’t happening because the turbines freeze and can’t spin during the cold blasts that make Minnesota so famous.

Problem: The turbines were made in sunny California. But in a Minnesota winter, the grease, oil and hydraulic fluids that lubricate the turbines freeze up and the turbines can’t spin. They just sit there, still. Result: No power.

The turbines were supposed to be on line before Christmas. But they haven’t been working since frigid weather settled in back in. The Minnesota Municipal Power Agency told the StarTribune that the 115-ft wind towers that were supposed to supply clean power to 11 towns won’t be back in operation for another couple of months, when spring comes around.

Meanwhile, in another setback for wind power, officials in Sangamon County, Illinois, are clamping down on zoning rules to restrict placement of future wind farms. The Illinois Times reports that county officials are considering new rules to require bigger buffers between communities and wind farms.

Wind farms would have to be at least half-a-mile away from communities of 10,000 citizens. Larger communities would get a 1.5-mile buffer between them and the turbine farms.

That’s the message President Obama floated this week.

When it comes to a choice between jobs and cap-and-trade, jobs are clearly the president’s top priority this year, even though just last week Obama voiced support for cap-and-trade during his State of the Union address.

Obama told a town hall meeting in Nashua, NH, it was time to put plans to create green jobs — by promoting renewable energy projects — on a separate track from capping U.S. GHG emissions. “We may be able to separate these things out. And, it’s conceivable that’s where the Senate ends up,” he told the New Hampshire crowd.

Oddly enough, it was Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) who was the fastest and loudest to denounce Obama’s apparent willingness to give up on a cap-and-trade bill, according to a report in The New York Times. The White House quickly insisted that cap-and-trade is still a Presidential priority.

However, Graham dismissed Obama’s plan to separate cap-and-trade from an energy policy as “half-assed.” The South Carolina Senator fears an energy-only bill won’t promote nuclear power and expanding off-shore drilling for oil.

Graham doesn’t think environmentalists will support his nuclear power and drilling goals without a cap-and-trade program. That’s why he’s seeking a compromise position.

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.

That’s the goal of a new green energy investment plan unveiled by the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband.

To get there, London’s offering lucrative incentives to get consumers to invest in solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and other low-carbon energy technologies by 2020, according to a story in the UK’s 24 Dash.com blog on housing issues.

To get there, London’s offering a “feed-in tariff” plan to purchase electricity generated by these small clean energy systems. For example, for a photovoltaic solar panel system, the government will pay owners to up about $1,000 for the installation.

The UK expects that small scale renewable energy projects — those less than five megawatts — will meet 2% of Britain’s electricity needs by 2020.

Meanwhile in the U.S., prospects for wind energy are looking good for small business and home owners interested in clean energy. Ron Stimmel with the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) points out that his industry’s eying a 30% increase in demand for wind energy projects for wind systems for homes and small businesses between 2009 and 2014.

There are two reasons for rising demand for wind turbines:

• 1) a 30% federal tax credit for wind energy installations that runs through 2018, and
• 2) prices for wind equipment are falling as manufacturers expand production capacity.

Proof: 2009 was a boom year for AWEA members. The group reports that the wind industry set an all time record by installing 10,000 megawatts of new generating capacity, enough to serve 2.4 million homes.