A Lot Of Energy Can Be Saved By Businesses Choosing to Go Green

The call is out for people to take up green ways of living at home, but imagine how it'd be if all businesses heeded the call in a similar way. There's so much waste taking place in the workplace that even a small effort would generate significant savings in energy and money. Reducing waste and keeping things clean seem to belong to a bygone era. Earlier generations, having grown up in lean times, knew the importance of being frugal.

Going green need not be distressful or expensive for business, given the many easy ways it can be done - but the environmental rewards would be fantastic. Office equipment generally, but particularly the office printer, are business items which offer opportunities for change. Numerous trees may be spared if less paper was consumed. Paper consumption may be cut by 50 percent simply by using both sides of the paper. Trees are used to clean up the environment by absorbing carbon dioxide, and converting it into oxygen, which would really help the atmosphere. Eliminating the use of paper is merely one way for an office to become earth-friendly.

With the expansion of the internet, businesses are nowadays connected all over the world, so the need for business travel should be able to be reduced. Those business conferences attended by men and women from all over and far away could be done away with, saving a good deal of money and energy. The coonsiderable amount of business travel that occurs, oftentimes using fuel gluttons and carbon spewers such as jets and large vehicles, places great demands on our planet. Let people carry out their conferences via live real-time video, which is a great deal more inexpensive than travel by jet. These days through the power of the internet, a lot of jobs that are done in the office can be done at home, saving car travel, and office expenses. This can make a huge difference, even though not every job can be done in this manner.

The use of email instead of paper-based communications is an obvious way for a business to become environmentally friendly. By simply paying bills online, a huge amount of paper could be saved. It will be good for the planet if more tasks are carried out using electronics and not paper. Laptops use a great deal less than energy than desktop computers and monitors, so there's one more way offices will be able to save energy. A PC plus monitor consume more or less 270 watts of energy, while a laptop uses 50 watts, at the most. An extra energy benefit of laptop computers is sleep mode, which is automatically entered after a certain period of not beng used, ordinarily set to between 15 and 20 minutes.

For people who feel they are saving energy with screensavers, the opposite is true, since they use more energy. The most effective way for a business to become green, and save a considerable amount of money, would be to switch off all computers and laptops when they are not in use. Enough energy to meet the power needs of the city of Chicago for a year would be saved by all business organizations doing this.