This is a guest post by Bruno Zago, UK&I Environmental Manager at HP
I wanted to put together a list of tips that can help you keep your business green and growing:
- Nominate a green champion who can evangelise for recycling, reducing power consumption, setting energy policies on computers and printers and so on.
- Make it part of their job description, give them time to do it properly and give them a (modest) budget to help them achieve the goals.
- Make sure that senior managers back their work. Give them plenty of air cover.
- Get a power consumption smart meter – in a small office you can get one that clamps onto the power cable where it comes into the building, for bigger offices you may need to need to talk to your energy supplier or have one that plugs into a power socket that you can move around and measures individual devices.
- Measure your consumption and use that data as a baseline to make reductions.
- Unplug or switch off devices at the mains if you’re not using them. Even in standby, things use power.
- Cut down printing costs by printing two pages on one and using a double sided printer.
- Use IT to cut costs. For example, HP used to send 25,000 employees a payslip by post. Now they get them online and it saves a huge amount of printing and postage.
- Similarly, an investment in satnav for company drivers can save money by avoiding traffic jams and helping people stay on track.
- Do meetings online instead. HP Virtual Rooms can help you avoid the journey in the first place.
- Look for PCs and notebooks that have low power consumption. This can save you a lot of money – tens of pounds every year per PC. For printers, look at the ‘yield’ which gives you an idea of how many pages you’ll get per ink cartridge for average use.
