When Green Measures Work at Your Workplace

It’s a bandwagon everyone wants to jump on, but when it actually comes to pulling their weight, they’re reluctant to do so. It’s all well and good to say that you want to do your bit to help the environment and that you’re going to make your office a greener place because you care. But unless you can actually make these green measures work and show positive feedback, your efforts don’t count for much. There are many easy and simple ways to go green at the office, but most of them don’t work out in the long or short run because not much thought is given to their implementation. The ideas are good, but without commitment and perseverance, they don’t work. Green measures at the workplace work only when:

• Every single person is committed to the task. Your office may have a plan to recycle, but if your colleague or you don’t bother to sort your trash before you dump it, your green measures are going down the dumpster too. So unless every single person is committed to the task of lowering energy usage and costs, minimizing the usage of paper and ink, and reducing their impact on the environment, you cannot claim that your office has “gone green.”

• The returns can be measured quantitatively. If you have a “minimize paper usage” rule, you must determine your usage every month and confirm that the numbers are lower with the passage of time. Unless you’re able to judge for yourself and see visible signs of a greener office, your green measures are not worth anything. The returns need not be immediate, but they have to start trickling in slowly at first and steadily as time goes by.

• The efforts are continuous and constant. You cannot give up on your green measures just because they’re hard to follow or difficult to implement. You must put in a sustained effort to see them through and encourage your co-workers and subordinates to do all they can to contribute to a cleaner environment. Unless your efforts are continuous and constant, they will not bear fruit.

• People are held accountable for their actions. While this may seem extreme to some people, sometimes, the only way to enforce rules is to hold people accountable for breaking them. So if a colleague is found guilty of not powering down their computer after the day’s work (and has instead left it to hibernate or sleep), he or she could be made to pay a small fine or reprimanded in a suitable way.
  When you care about the environment and want to make a difference at your workplace, you must realize that it is a team effort that requires dedication and discipline, just like one of your projects.

This guest post is contributed by Nicole Adams, she writes on the topic of construction management. She welcomes your comments at her email id: nicole.adams83@gmail.com.

To the Climate Change Skeptics

I get that not everyone is on board that the climate is changing, polar ice caps are melting and natural resources are being used at an unsustainable rate. But what I honestly don't get is knowingly turning a blind eye to the environment altogether. Or valuing nature so little, that it plays absolutely no role in decision making. I mean, shouldn't the environment play at least some role in where we live, what we drive (or choose not to drive), where we get our food, and the kinds of durable and consumable goods we buy?

I was listening to NPR where the reporter was talking to advertising analysts about a recent marketing study that showed that when people buy green goods, they really don't buy them because they are good for the environment. Rather, they buy "green" goods because they care mostly their own health (or the low cost). So advertisers are picking up on this and changing messages about how products are good for health or saving money rather than how good they might be for the earth. That got me a little riled up.

Then, last night, I was speaking to a crowd of grade school parents and one of the parents came up to me afterwards asking about escalators. Specifically, he was from Egypt and was surprised that in the U.S., escalators are always "on" whereas even in third world countries, they all have motion sensors so that they only run when needed. He was confused about this since he knows that the same companies produce escalators globally, i.e. Otis and others. We sadly came to the conclusion that it wasn't a matter of access to technology, its just that in the U.S., it never even occurs to us that escalators waste energy when they aren't being used and just sit there running. It doesn't even hit our radar screen. That got me really riled up.

So what is going on? In the U.S. especially, what is stopping us from doing the right thing for the environment? Is it marketing and advertising? Is it our isolationist attitude and seemingly endless source of natural resources? How is it that we are so cut off from nature that things like using continuously moving escalators, driving to a destination three blocks down the street, leaving all of our lights on and eating food from 12,000 miles away is not perceived as highly in-efficient and downright wasteful?

For all of you skeptics out there... I get that you are tired of the media hype and need more scientific evidence to feel convinced. But doesn't some of our behavior need a little rationalizing and a dose of common sense?

Nau Clothing

I just found a great source for green clothing for women and men looking for "cleaner" and more casual day to day ware. Call it metro-sexual garb for bikers and mountain climbers. Nau, based out of Portland, OR, is a twenty-person company and clearly passionate about design. Their goods are carried in retail stores across the U.S. and you can buy them on their website as well.

Their principles of sustainable design?

• 2% of every sale to our humanitarian and environmental Partners for Change; cut-and-sew factories that adhere to their Code of Conduct.


• Natural, renewable fibers produced in a sustainable manner; synthetic fabrics that contain high recycled content; managed toxics in all product finishes and dyes; salvaged and recycled materials for retail fixtures.


• Styles and product details that are considered, timeless, and able to move seamlessly through the day and all its unpredictabilities.

I found the section about global sourcing on their website particularly revealing. It just goes to show how difficult it is to draw lines in the sand when it comes to making sustainable choices in the fashion industry these days.

We manufacture our clothing in four countries—Canada, China, Thailand and Turkey—using fabrics from China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Thailand and the U.S.A. One reason we manufacture many of our products in Asia is because many of our cutting-edge textiles originate only in Asia, and one of our goals is to have our production facilities as close as possible to where our fabric, hardware and fixtures originate, in order to reduce the environmental impact of shipping.

For many of the products we are producing (some of the most highly tailored and technical on the market) the required skill sets and technologies no longer exist in the U.S. While there are U.S.-made garments available to consumers, they are almost always less technical than what Nau designs, and are produced in far greater volume. The demise of the U.S. textile and garment-manufacturing segment of the economy is a well-known macro-economic trend, in place for many years. While disappointing, this is not something that we, as a small newcomer brand, can truly counteract.

Thankfully, along with the years of industry experience that many of our staff members bring to our team comes lasting, established relationships with foreign manufacturers whose practices and integrity we know and trust. Of course overseas production is not without controversy, but if approached with honesty and transparency, and monitored by a system of checks and balances, we believe it can actually benefit the people and countries where the work is done.

HOK Wins APA Award

HOK, the General Services Administration and the University of Maryland recently partnered to write a comprehensive guide for sustainable development in the federal government. The work is being honored by the Federal Planning Division of the American Planning Association.

The guide won the award because it was a part of the GSA Sustainable Development Education Initiative, which was selected as the “Winner” in the Outstanding Sustainable Planning, Design and Development Initiative Category.

Titled “The New Sustainable Frontier – Principles of Sustainable Development,” the guide was published last summer by the Government Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy.

Here is a link to the executive summary of the guide. http://www.gsa.gov/graphics/ogp/2009_New_Sustainable_Frontier_Complete_Guide.pdf

The making of the guide was a fantastic learning experience for all… experts in Ecological Economics at the University of Maryland helped give a business context to the guide. Also, HOK facilitated a work session with several dozen key sustainability leaders across federal agencies and green companies from the corporate sector to understand unique organizational concerns. Jonathan Herz’s with the GSA led the team and his focus on making the guide “practical and usable” as well as “scientifically sound” produced excellent results.

Special kudos go to Anica Landreneau, Alesia Call and Todd Pedersen (all bloggers for The Green Workplace) who wrote the executive summary and extensive appendices. Seriously, if you’re looking for good case studies, bibliographies, definitions of sustainable vocabulary… go to the appendix here: http://www.gsa.gov/graphics/ogp/The_New_Sustainable_Frontier_Appendix.pdf

My favorite part of the guide? The end of the executive summary where the team structured a series of questions related to building buildings, buying products and procuring services. The questions are tools that federal employees should ask to green their daily operations. Here are a few of them.

1. LOOK FOR AN ALTERNATIVE to consuming additional natural resources and generating greenhousegases, by asking:

• How can we support operations efficiently, and with just distribution of resources, while reducingthe Government’s ecological footprint?
• Are we using existing stocks?
• Can we use a service instead of owning this product?d. Can we reuse and an existing facility rather than building a new one?

2. KNOW WHAT YOU ARE BUYING, when there is no alternative to consumption. Make sure that theacquisition is consistent with the Government’s environmental and social goals by asking:

• WHO MADE IT? Does its production and use allow all to live with respect?
• WHAT’S IN IT? Is there a third party assessment of contents available to help us makeinformed decisions, such as an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)60 or ASTM International“Sustainability Assessment of Building Products”?
• HOW DOES ITS PRODUCTION AND USE AFFECT THE EARTH’S CRITICAL ECOSYSTEMS?
• WHERE DOES IT GO WHEN IT IS NO LONGER NEEDED?

3. SHARE THE GOVERNMENT’S VISION FOR SUSTAINABILITY WITH SUPPLIERS, AND FAVOR THOSE THAT SUPPORT THAT VISION.

The Solar Bottle

One-sixth of the world’s population has no access to safe drinking water, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, Hepatitis A, and dysentery.

When attending an exhibition with the theme “H2O” at Milan’s International Furniture Fair, Alberto Meda, a furniture and lighting designer, and Francisco Gomez Paz, an industrial designer, learned about the solar water disinfection system (SODIS), a simple, low-cost solution for treating drinking water at a household level. Transparent plastic bottles are filled with contaminated water. When exposed to full sunlight for six hours, the pathogens in the water are destroyed.

Meda and Paz designed a container that brings out the best of the SODIS system, and the result is Solar Bottle, which has one transparent face for ultra-violet A and infrared ray collection and an aluminum color to increase the reflections. The high ratio surface and thickness of the low-cost container improves the performance of solar disinfection, and its flat shape makes it stackable and facilitates storage. A handle makes it possible to regulate the angle for best solar exposition and ensures easy transportation.

Hope this "Green Team" doesn't come to your office!

Green Team from Will Ferrell

DC Bag Tax in Effect

Today I stopped by my neighborhood drug store on the way home from work. I noticed the store has recently been reconfigured to accept self check out. This new technology has had two benefits that I can see: 1) the lines move much faster and 2) it overtly asked you "how many bags you are taking" and then charges you 5 cents per bag. By the check out counter there are only plastic bags to choose from, so it's the plastic bag or nothing. DC has recently passed a "bag tax" of 5 cents per paper or plastic bag starting the first of the year.

What was really interesting about this experience for me was the fact that I was buying a bunch of bulky items today and I really was considering picking up a bag to carry them a few blocks home. But in a split second... literally the moment after I realized that picking up a bag would cost me something... I decided to make due with stuffing the items in the bag I had with me. It's like I was watching myself in a social behavior experiment... will she take the bag if it costs her something? Or will the small cost of 5 cents not even enter her conscience? Honestly, I changed my mind to go sans bag, and probably would have again, even if the bag cost just a penny.

This little experience today has reinforced my belief in the importance of incentives and disincentives to drive behavior to be more environmentally friendly. Let's take this same analogy to the workplace. What if companies had to pay more hefty fines for garbage pickup? What if individuals had to pay for Styrofoam cups at the coffee bar? Would we make the same decisions if we always had to pay for the negative externalities of our choices?

In Doug McKenzie-Mohr's book, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: Community Based Social Marketing, he uses countless examples of leveraging positive and negative incentives to help the environment. Here are a couple of good ones:

When San Jose, California introduced a user pay program in which residents were charged based upon the size of the container they placed at the curb, the impact was a 46% decrease in waste sent to the landfill, a 158% increase in recyclables captured, and a 38% increase in yard waste collected. There was no charge for curbside recycling and yard waste was collected at the curbside.

Worchester, Massachusets introduced a program in which residents purchased bags for their garbage. This program resulted in a 45% reduction in the waste stream, with recycling responsible for 37% of the waste stream diversion. Residents were not charged for recycling nor for dropping off yard waste at a collection center.

Ride Shark... Green Commuting is Fun

I live the in the Washington, D.C. area and one of the more interesting habits of commuters here is a practice called "slugging." At specific points throughout the city, drivers line up (as do passengers) and random strangers ride together to take advantage of HOV lanes. Drop off points in town are also centralized, so the system is surprisingly predictable. After having lived here a while, I've heard mostly good stories about this practice but a few bad stories too. Not everyone has a similar view on how to handle speed limits, for example. A number of riders have gotten to work a little more ruffled than when they left the house.

So how do you find a good carpool without depending on a strangers to drive you to work? That's where products like Ride Shark come into play.



Ride Shark basically connects people with a similar commute pattern together in a carpool. They have different systems for creating carpools within companies, within campuses and within metro areas. They facilitate carpools, vanpools as well as biking, walking and bus-riding buddies. They also can help you find an emergency ride home if you need it. And the best part? They track your "carbon emissions saved" by using their system.

Think of it as a transportation demand management and social networking tool all wrapped into one.

A number of my clients are using it and love it. They claim to especially enjoy the feature that allows companies or groups to compete against each other to reduce carbon emissions. Nothing like a little competition to make that morning commute more fun!

My Vote for The Fun Theory

Voting for "The Fun Theory" Award or BMW's competition for changing people's behavior for the better ended January 15. My vote goes for the two entries below. My two favorites are called "Fighting Germs with Fun" by Steven Blumenfeld and "Make Your Boyfriend Clean the Apartment" by Meirav Adler. For more information, see our post Save the Earth with Fun (Theory).

Book Event at AIA Center of Architecture in NY

Thanks to the AIA and HOK NY marketing team (Kim Dowdell, Chris Laul, Sharon Paculor, Liz Royzman, Alex Robb) for pulling together a fantastic book signing event for The Green Workplace at the Center of Architecture last Thursday night. Food provided by a local and organic caterer Natural Chef.

Interview with Stacy Straczynski from Contract Magazine here.