A new report from the World Wildlife Fund indicates that non-manufacturing companies could cut their carbon footprint in half by allowing telework. With more and more companies looking to reduce their eco-impact, a shift towards telecommuting would be a big step forward.

But what about all of those meetings?

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Want to help green up your office?

Manager not listening?

1.  Try these suggestions.
2.  Frame them in a money-saving language.
3.  Stand back.
4.  Watch pointy-haired-boss’s ears perk up.

• Substitute travel with videoconference or a web-based tool for getting together. Not only will you be ‘back in the office’ 5 minutes after your meeting is over (ahem, productivity…), you will be able to stay in your own bed, at your own home, with your family.  It will also save your company hotel, airfare, cabs, and meals/entertainment costs.  Don’t have videoconference?  Try Webex.  You can watch others on camera, and listen real-time.
• Shut down computers at night. Now this one is probably trickier than it first appears.  Talk to your IT department.  Night time is usually when they like to do system-wide updates, and they don’t like having to run around and fix people’s computers when they’re having problems because the person’s computer was not available for system-wide fixes at night.  But work with your IT folks and let them know what you’d like to do.  At the very least, pick one night per week that everyone has to leave their computers on, and have the IT department send out an email out on that day to let everyone know to keep their computers on.

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I just got copies of the books yesterday, so have only had a chance to flip through them. Fortunately, they’re organized to make such flipping a useful activity: while either book could be read from cover to cover, the division of chapters in each makes it easy to find the exact information you want.  I particularly like the layout of Your Life, as it combines substantive sections on greening your home (inside and out) and lifestyle with short, self-explanatory tips set off in text boxes. My Office Handbook doesn’t just look at paper and energy use at work, but uses the framework of the typical workday: getting ready in the morning, traveling to work, and even eating lunch. The information I read looks solid, and I can definitely see the advantages (especially for “green newbies”) of having all of this information centralized in one place.

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Think about how much you use. Think about how much a company of 50 uses. 500. To use supplies that are less impactful, or perhaps even eliminating the damage they typically do, has enormous potential.

It’s this thinking that led Gil Yaron, once a lawyer focused on shareholder activism and socially responsible investing to create Vancouver based FrogFile in 2006. In his work leading up to this, he saw that many companies were interested in greening their office operations, but they didn’t quite know how or where to do that. Then once they did know what they wanted to do, there wasn’t a place to get what they needed.

FrogFile seeks to be a remedy for this quandary. And yet, you might say, green office supplies seem to be everywhere these days, both online and in office supply stores large and small. What does FrogFile contribute, and how do they stand out from this growing chorus?

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This contest, open to all U.S. businesses, will award one winning company with a $5,000 shopping spree on the company’s online Ecoffice Source catalog.

Since our readers tend to really, really like our “greening your office” posts, I thought I’d see if anyone wanted to take up the challenge. Sponsored by Corporate Express US Inc. The contest runs June 30, 2008 to Sunday, August 31, 2008. To enter, go to http://www.corporateexpress.com/greencontest to download and fill out the Ecoffice Makeover Official Entry FormEntrants.

Be prepared to submit an electronic presentation of up to twenty slides in length on why your organization deserves an “Ecoffice Makeover” - whether you have just started to work on sustainability or if you’ve already taken significant steps toward going green.

“Purchasing eco-preferable products is just one of the many steps that businesses can take toward greater workplace sustainability,” said Walter Scott, vice president of marketing and e-commerce, Corporate Express US. “Through this contest, we want to help raise awareness with businesses about the breadth of eco-conscious products that are available for the office.”

That and to sell more office products.

Related Posts About Greening Your Office:

Stocking the Green Office: Sustainable Supplies

Eco-Entrepreneurs Are Talking About: Greening Your Office

How To Green Your Law Firm

How can a mahogany desk, made of slow-growing hard wood plundered from the Amazon, be eco-friendly?

When it’s re-used.

Often, the greenest consumer route is not buying new products made with Earth-friendly methods but rather scoring used products made with traditional, possibly heinous methods. Reduce, reuse, then recycle.

This rule of thumb certainly applies to office furniture. Unlike energy-consuming products such as appliances, furniture is somewhat innocuous to the environment during that period between factory and landfill known as “in use.” The impacts on indoor air quality, however, are like Britney: Not that innocent.

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Many people spend a great deal of time working in offices, and to have a mainstream supplier actively promoting awareness about the value of using green office products will likely lead to many people that may not have previously found relevance in their lives to consider more deeply what they choose to purchase for their office, and perhaps other parts of their lives.

Why Office Max?

Why exactly did Terracycle, the scrappy company (literally, reusing scrap production waste in some products) decide to partner with the massive Office Max? Listen up green startups, this is important: They are able to go beyond their youthful  excitement about all things green, and hear from people with decades of experience what consumers are actually buying, where they want things to be greener, and where the most impact can be made. And, having a large, deeply ingrained distribution network, Office Max can also allow Terracycle to more confidently venture into making new products, with a sharply reduced time on the development cycle. This plus being able to produce larger numbers right away leads to  being able to keep their prices at an everyday level, so that a broad segment of the population can and will try them.

Review of  innovative green office products from Terracycle

So where does that lead Terracycle? It leads them to start with 7 new products, and have several more coming soon, including paper made from Mango leaves. More on that below. I had the pleasure of trying many of them out, and here’s what I found:

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Whether you’re working from home or from a downtown high-rise, you can conserve paper, reduce energy use, and produce less waste by keeping the environment in mind for all your office purchases. In this article, I’ll share ideas for stocking your green office and sources of green office products.

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There’s always more you can do, but the most important thing is to do something! Baby steps in the right direction are certainly better than going backwards or not moving at all. Thankfully, many green business practices are not only eco-friendly, but they’re friendly on the company budget as well. So even if the benefits to the planet are hard to see, benefits to your bottom line may be more visible.

Since I’m a habitual list-maker, here’s a handy list of ten simple things you can do to make your business a bit more sustainable every day.

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Come join the discussion!

All entrepreneurs are interested in saving money and operating efficiently.

Eco-entrepreneurs also want to do so in a way that benefits the planet.

Perhaps because our companies’ missions, products and services are creatively and often elegantly eco, we find unique ways of doing that.

Take a look at some of Green Options ecopreneurs’ ideas on how to create an eco-office!

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Green Teams can help.

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Many of us are working to green our home lives but it is important to bring that green initiative to the workplace as well. Offices generate tons and tons of waste everyday.

The often forgotten first step in any greening process is to reduce the amount of waste generated. Remember reduce, reuse, recycle? Recycling is the last step. Try this: gather up a few of your co-workers from different areas of your office and spend five minutes talking about paper usage habits. I gurantee that you’ll find dozens of ways to reduce paper use in those five glorious earth-saving minutes.

Quick n’ easy ideas to get the ball rolling are to save single-sided prints for note paper (you can even make little note pads using the paper cutter and stapler) and stop printing emails, you really don’t need to, I promise. In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded (PDF) in the United States. This is up from 29 percent in 2000. We’re actually discarding more paper than we did before the Web became available  to us civillians. Paper is a great place to start but this process can be applied to just about every office supply you use everyday.

Once you’ve considered how to reduce and resuse your office products more efficiently you can move on to the recycling part of the formula. Again, paper is a great place to start seeing a difference as more than 90 percent of the printing and writing paper made in the US is from virgin tree fiber. One fantastic resource I’ve found that makes it easy to switch to recycled office products is The Green Office, which Kelli mentioned in her great back to school article.

The website explicitly states the recycled content of any given product, even breaking down the post-consumer percentage. The Green Office also lets you know if a product is biodegradable, certified by a third party for some better-than-conventional aspect and if the product uses less chemicals than its conventional counterparts. The Green Office does sell conventionally produced products as a convenience to the consumer (so you don’t have to shop elsewhere) but offers green products wherever it can.

Be sure to place recycling bins in convenient spots all around the office (at the copier, the fax, in each cube, etc). Then, once you’ve used and reused those post-consumer recycled products find a recycler near you to pick up your recycling on a regular basis.

Once you get the ball rolling in your workplace and you make the boss realize the added PR value of going green you might mention that The Green Office also provides sustainability consulting and information about how your office can offset its carbon emissions.