With all the talk lately about carbon footprints and eco-everything, you may already have taken steps to reduce your household’s impact on the environment. But what about your workplace?

Many offices are already recycling and making efforts to reduce waste (such as going “paperless” or providing reusable coffee mugs rather than Styrofoam cups). There are a lot of other easy things you can do to help shrink your office’s impact on the environment.

To get some ideas for “going green” in the workplace, we turned to mompreneur Diane MacEachern. Diane is the author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World and the founder of BigGreenPurse.com, a site that helps shoppers identify eco-friendly and fair trade products.

Diane shared a few of her favorite easy ways to help “green” up your business:

• Offer employees organic coffee and tea. There are now eco-friendly coffee services available to meet company needs for refreshments as well as green living.

• Let employees tele-commute at least one day a week. You’ll help employees reduce stress, save money on gasoline, and protect the planet by reducing CO2 emissions.

• Make “casual” day every day. Employees can wash-and-wear clothes rather than those that require dry cleaning with toxic chemicals

• Subsidize employee use of mass transit, or provide van pools. Make it easy for employees to carpool and otherwise drive less.

• Offer on-the-job workshops and seminars in green living. Many people are confused about green choices. Offer a “green” benefit by providing information and links to resources that will make it easy for employees to live green at home as well as at work.

To learn more about how to shop green (and tell the difference between products that are truly environmentally friendly and those that have just been “greenwashed”), visit www.biggreenpurse.com.

Subscribe to blog via RSS