Lessening Your Environmental Impact

There are many options to create a more environmentally conscious environment. Working with sunlight instead of artificial lights “protects against inflammation, lowers high blood pressure, helps muscles, improves brain function and may even protect against cancer”. This also can help you save on electricity bills, and can reduce eyestrain from harsh fluorescent lights. Remembering to turn off lights when leaving rooms can save countless amounts of energy from being wasted and prevents your business from having to pay for unnecessarily brightly lit empty rooms.  

Reusable cutlery and dishware leads to more awareness of food portions and reduces the amount of trash inside landfills. The health benefits of meal prepping food, where you are aware of exactly what goes into your food, far outweigh the convenience of artificial packaged foods pumped with preservatives. Using your own containers leads to more knowledge about the amount of food being consumed, which is helpful for being more mindful of eating habits. The decrease in demand for single-use plastics can also lead to smaller carbon footprints, which cuts down on the amount of greenhouse gases produced. Landfills can also contaminate local water supplies, and reusing containers can help prevent this.

Another great way to cut down on the physical waste produced from work’s daily activities is to keep electronic copies of documents instead of paper hard copies. This can ensure that the document will not be lost or damaged, cuts down on printer maintenance costs, and keeps trash thrown out every day low. Fax machines are almost non-existent in today’s day and age, with email being a much more prevalent and convenient way of sending and receiving documents. Editing documents is a much more collaborative experience when in the cloud, and portions of text can be moved around with greater ease than when printed on paper.

Many ways of lessening an impact on the environment are very easy to implement and many actually lead to other benefits in daily life. Try easing some of these tips into your work life!