Green Offices – Groovy Green

15 Tips for Saving the Environment

ByGroovy Green Jun 9, 2021

Whether you have a large business or a small one such as doing web design from home, sustainability is important. Not only does it help save the earth’s resources, it usually helps the bottom line of your business as well. Even if you can only implement one or two sustainable practices it all helps; if every business did the same the earth would soon become pristine again.

There are many green practices that can be implemented by small and large businesses alike. Here are some of them.

Use natural light and ventilation wherever possible.
Pop on a jumper before switching on the heater or air conditioner.
Using an air-con takes less power than a radiant heater – so long as it’s a modern one
Use scrap paper for note-taking. This is easier when you have a box or tray especially for waste paper. You might print out something you don’t need now or that had an error. Keep those sheets to use for scrap. You can write notes on the back of them
When printing, use greyscale or toner save mode for in-house copy. Make sure recycled paper does not contain sensitive information.

Saving the Environment

5 Ways to Go Green In Your Business

ByGroovy Green Apr 12, 2021

Going green in your business is not only important to help save resources, it often means a savings in costs that you didn’t expect. Since both these things are positive, there is really no reason for not making at least some changes towards sustainability, whether you run a small SEO business like SEO Perth or a coffee shop.

Here are 5 ways to go green in your business –

Saving on water usage is easy.

Install low-flow toilets
Fix dripping taps or leaking cisterns
Choose low-flow taps and shower heads.
If you have an outdoor area to maintain, use drought tolerant plants and mulch to prevent soil drying out. Install irrigation with a sensor so water is not wasted.
If you clean with a hose, use a high pressure washer because it will use less water

Waste reduction in the office

In the office kitchen use bulk supplies of condiments rather than single serves, which are way more expensive.
Encourage employees to bring refillable water bottles and their own coffee mugs, instead of using bottled water and plastic mugs.
Compost kitchen waste and offer it to local growers
Consider warm air hand dryers if you want to go paperless
Save documents digitally if possible.

Go Green In Your Business

Eco Friendly Ways to Use Your Computer

ByGroovy Green Feb 12, 2021

With billions of kilos of computer waste being generated every year, it is a good idea to ensure your computer usage, at least, is eco friendly. If you use your computer a lot, you might be into web design or digital marketing, but even if you just use it at home and not for a business, the computer has a high energy consumption rate. Using it in eco-friendly ways is good for the earth’s resources and suitable for your budget.

Here are some tips on how to save power with your computer.

Make sure your monitor’s sleep feature is set to power down automatically when you are away from it for a while. Look for ‘Power Options’ in your control panel. While sleep mode still uses some energy, it can also save much.
Ensure you turn your monitor off each night and when you will be away all day or for a few hours. This will save a great deal on power usage.
Lower the display brightness. The brighter your monitor is, the more power is being used. Another advantage is that a dimmer light reduces eye strain.
If you have an animated screen saver, turn it off. These were to protect the old monitors. Newer LCD or LED monitors don’t need this type of protection, and animated screensavers take up a lot of power, even if they are fun to watch.

Why Your Dental Clinic Could Be Harming The Environment

ByGroovy Green Nov 17, 2020

In recent years, every business, and every profession, including dentists, has had to do a ‘green audit’ on itself, and think seriously about how the way it operates impacts the environment. Long gone are the days when the only industries that were thought to be harming the environment were the big polluters. Now, even the smallest one-person business operating from home should be thinking of its green credentials.

Of course, dentists have also had to look at how they operate, and this has been an ongoing progress, both at an industry level, and at those levels where an individual dental clinic considers its day to day practices.

Now it might be the case that how your dental practice operates has not been measured against how green it should be. After all, a visit to the dentist for most patients is not something they would associate with harming the environment.

However, whether it is in the reception area, waiting room, treatment room, or staff room there is almost certain to be something that can be changed, replaced, or improved to make your dental practice more environmentally friendly.

In fact, many studies have shown that the dentistry industry produces more than its fair share of chemicals and materials that are harmful to the environment, is responsible for a great deal of energy usage, and generates literally millions of items of waste that are thrown away, which could otherwise be recycled.

How Can We Reduce Paper Usage in the Office?

ByGroovy Green Jul 28, 2020

In the modern world of digital devices and fast, secure messaging, there’s very little excuse for excessive paper use. Unfortunately, many small businesses continue to waste huge amounts of paper every day.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things that you can do to reduce paper usage in your office, thereby reducing your overall environmental impact. In the rest of this article, I’ve looked at a few of these methods. You might be surprised by just how basic some of them are, because I know I was!

Anyway, let’s jump straight into it.

Print Less

This should be relatively self-explanatory, but it’s amazing just how many companies continue to print huge numbers of documents when they absolutely aren’t necessary. Next time you’re thinking about printing, consider whether or not you really need to. Some alternatives include:

Sending out digital copies of presentations of meeting agendas, rather than handing out hard copies.
Emailing a document, rather than printing and delivering a hard copy.
Taking notes and saving them online, rather than printing and filing hard copies.

As you can imagine, reducing your printing volume will not only save paper – it could save your business a lot of money as well!

Reduce Paper Usage

5 Tips For Eco-friendly Office Cleaning

ByGroovy Green Jul 2, 2018

In the modern world people are more aware than ever about climate change, environmental destruction and the impacts simple everyday actions are having on the Earth. If you think of yourself as an environmentally friendly person who is conscious of the effects that their actions are having on the planet, then you should consider adopting eco-friendly cleaning practices. If you own a commercial building that you don’t clean yourself, you can still use eco-friendly cleaning – simply choose the right commercial cleaner!

Our top 5 tips for eco-friendly office cleaning include:

Find The Right Cleaning Contractor

If you own a large commercial or residential building, you probably don’t clean it yourself. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t adopt environmentally friendly cleaning practices. Simply search for a cleaning contractor who is happy to clean the way you want them to. There are plenty of options out there, so make sure that you do your research and speak to a number of companies before you make your choice.

Make Sure You Recycle

If you own or manage a building, then you can keep it clean in a way that is good for the planet by providing recycling bins in communal areas. Many buildings don’t do this, instead opting for general rubbish bins, which result in a lot of recyclable material being sent to landfill.

Eco-friendly Office Cleaning

Is Your Office Green?

ByGroovy Green Aug 8, 2017

It is the trend these days to make your office green. Even if you work from home in web design or a similar type of work, if you have an office or work in the living room you’ll be inside a lot of the time, so it’s important that your work environment is green. Sustainability is about more than saving the earth’s resources or even making it a more pleasant place to be. It touches each one of us at a personal level.

If the environment is not clean and green, the air you breathe is not going to be healthy. If you don’t breathe healthy air, you won’t be healthy either. At the very least you’ll feel tired and lethargic much of the time. By making your office green, you’ll be doing a good thing for your own health as well as for the environment you live in.

Having a green office can be simple. Adding some greenery in the form of pot plants helps to add more oxygen to the air and so it is healthier for you. Having a growing plant or two to look at also has a positive effect on people. Studies have shown that people work more productively when there are plants around them. So if you want to become more productive, add a plant – or three.

Natural lighting is another positive element as far as going green is concerned. Being under fluorescent lighting or even LED lighting all day long is not good for us. It emits what is called blue light, which tends to interfere with sleep patterns. People who work from home late into the evening or who take work home with them to do at night are at risk of having poor sleep patterns.

Sustainability

How To Be Eco Friendly In The Office

ByGroovy Green Jan 12, 2017

These days, with just a little bit of effort, everything we do can be eco friendly to some extent, whether it is at home, or at a home or work office. You may have set up business as a digital marketing agency such as Slinky Digital and work on your computer all day long. If everyone does something to reduce their carbon footprint, the result will be incredible and our precious resources will last a lot longer.

If you have a computer, you will most likely also have a printer. Not all printers are efficient, but laser printers can be said to be better than inkjet printers because the ink will not smudge if it gets wet. So when you print out a sheet, you won’t have to reprint it due to any smudges, thus saving ink. And you can usually print more with one toner cartridge than one container of ink.

Another way to ensure your printer is eco friendly is to purchase one that spits out those pages quickly. All printers use power while they are printing; if a printer takes 30 or even 10 seconds to print one page of type, it will take a lot longer and so use more power than one that can print a page in 1 or 2 seconds. So it’s important to look at the specifications of a printer before you purchase it.

So look at the pages per minute the printer will do, but also look at what other features it has that you may need. Having a printer that can hold 250 pages is a lot more convenient than one which can only hold 10 pages.

Eco Friendly

If Darth Vader Built A Treehouse, It Would Looks Something Like This

ByGroovy Green Jan 18, 2010

A lot of people are comparing this beautiful treehouse in Portland, Oregon to a hobbit dwelling. Personally, add a little black paint and it looks like something Darth Vader would retreat to when things get a little to hectic on the Death Star. It also looks like it would double as a swanky TIE fighter. From the architect,

Located on a flag lot, a steep sloping grade provided the opportunity to bring the main level of the house into the tree canopy to evoke the feeling of being in a tree house. A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

Green Building

The Green Picture: Church Becomes A Part Of Mother Nature

ByGroovy Green Mar 5, 2009

I’m a big fan of watching nature re-claim buildings — and this is a perfect example of that. Best I can tell, this is a church in Toronto. Now, I’m not sure whether the building is abandoned or if someone has been neglecting the ivy. Either way, there’s certainly not much sunlight entering through that window anymore!

Green Building, Green Living

Harnessing The Power Of Luffas For Shade And Sponges

ByGroovy Green Mar 24, 2008

If you’re a regular reader, you no doubt know we here at Groovy have a fascination with the seemingly magical properties of the Luffa. Not only can it be harvested to create the sponge-like scrubber most people love in the tub, but it can also help shade your home and keep things cool in the heat of summer. Just ask John Lawvere — an entire side of his trailer in Arizona is shaded from the sun with several Luffa vines. Additionally, he makes some extra cash from his crop by selling the “sponges” for $5/each come harvest time. Says John,

“I teach Physics at a community college in Tucson, AZ. My remodeling/plumber friend helped me a lot at building supports for Luffa vines. We have an idea about building structures over parking lots (near apartment complexes and other businesses) to save those people money on air conditioning while producing a valuable crop.”

Not a bad idea, right? We applaud John and his amazing “Luffa Tunnel” — something he says “convinced my girlfriend’s mother (in Belarus) that I was a good man.” Ha, nice.

For our original classic, “How To Make (And Grow) A Luffa”, click here

Green Building, How To

Beijing’s Olympic Aquatic Centre Is A Green Wonder

ByGroovy Green Feb 6, 2008

Just in time for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing, the official grand opening of the Olympic Aquatic Centre took place this past Monday in celebration of its unique architecture and eco-friendly characteristics.

The building, four years in the making, is nicknamed the “Water Cube” and is a rectangular-shaped steel design covered by a membrane of brightly lit blue bubbles. Not only are these stunning to look at, but they also serve an important purpose in reducing energy costs by 30%. The membrane is made out of a material called ETFE, (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene) which absorbs solar radiation and reduces thermal loss. Very similar, I suppose, to the way a solar cover works on a pool.

Not only is ETFE recyclable, but it’s also very strong; capable of bearing up to 400 times its own weight. Gizmag fills us in on additional details,

Energy, Green Building, Water

Green Roof Proposed For Stretch Of California Highway

ByGroovy Green Jan 25, 2008

This sounds like a wonderful idea — if anyone happens to have $200 million lying around.

A plan has been submitted to cover a stretch of California highway with a 24-acre park. It would be built on a deck constructed over the below-grade portion of the Hollywood Freeway (US-101). Organizers argue that by placing a “cap” over one of the world’s most congested freeway systems, the necessary ventilation system would clean the air before re-circulating it back into the environment — creating a positive improvement in air quality for LA. Additionally, the park would also provide a nexus between East Hollywood and Central Hollywood–”alleviating the strain on the community from the initial creation of the freeway through this section of Hollywood.” From the site,

Eco Sac: The Water Bladder For Your Home

ByGroovy Green Oct 23, 2007

If giant rain barrels aren’t aesthetically pleasing or you lack the room for installation, you may want to consider the Eco Sac; a flexible rainwater bladder storage system that hides away under decks or floors. Each sac is manufactured using “industrial strength fabric sealed by high frequency welding.”

According to the site, the eco sac is better than your average rain barrel because a.) it captures water faster than rigid tanks, b.) you can use multiple bladders which all fill at the same rate and at the same time c.) it is guaranteed not to leak and d.) it is algae resistant and the water stored is potable.

Pretty cool idea for those with limited space to capture rainfall. There are 54 different sizes to choose from, ranging from 2,200 liters to 8,600 liters. Apparently, you can join multiple sacs together to get up to 50,000 liters or more water storage.

Much like the portable grey water recycler we wrote about earlier this week, this product is currently only available in Australia. Something tells me however — with the water woes currently affecting parts of the U.S. — that we’ll be seeing more of these stateside shortly.

Green Building, Green Living, Tech Innovations