Going green and saving money
I have finally decided that I will actively pursue a green policy in my businesses. Shameful as it may seem, I have been so busy selling and resourcing work that the whole green agenda has passed me by.
My view has been heavily influenced by the fact that going green can save us money as well. Simple issues, such as conserving electricity, can have a big impact on our bottom line. At the very least I should be able to mitigate any prices rises we are likely to see by being more environmentally friendly.
So, here are some of the steps I am taking:
Electricity – I am now making sure that all computers and peripherals are shut down at night and will try and do so at lunchtimes, although this is a bit more difficult. My team have desk lamps as the lighting is not brilliant so I encourage them to switch them off when away from their desks. We have a couple of PCs which act as file servers, storing old Word documents. I am speaking to someone about consolidating these two servers into one so that we can shut off the second PC. After all we are only using 30% of the disk space.
Printing – A bit of a bug bear with me, but we are trying to get the double sided printing facility to work so we can save paper. One of my team has the annoying habit of printing out all his emails and sitting at his desk reading them. Apart from being a waste of paper it’s a ludicrous thing to do, so I will be sitting him down this afternoon and having a tutorial on using Microsoft Outlook. I have put in place paper recycle bins and we now reuse paper that is printed on one side as note paper.
Old Computers – We have a cupboard full of old kit including computers and disk drives. I have been meaning to clear this out for ages but now feel I need to, but carefully. From a security viewpoint I need to make sure all of the hard disks have been deleted and then we are looking at donating these computers to charity. You can no longer, quite rightly, throw electrical items away as they contain so many heavy metals and other horrible things it is too dangerous.
I am also considering the office space we use. Due to the nature of our work we could go completely virtual – people could work at home and we could save money on the rent. But that’s a story for another day.
In the mean time if you are interested in being greener with your IT then take a look at the following guide:
Environmentally friendly IT and reducing waste in your business
By: Mr BITG, Virtual Director, Business IT Guide
