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Quarter 4, 2009 Contents
Greening Your Business Greening Your Business newsletter is a quarterly e-newsletter containing stories, resources and ideas for established businesses that details how you can reduce their environmental impact. This newsletter serves those looking for ways to modify corporate attitude for reducing carbon footprint – a corporate "grass-roots" movement, if you will. Visit our website at Greening YourBusiness.com to connect with other subscribers. We are always interested in new green solutions and the progress of your green business. |
Cleaning up – coordinating operation green-clean with your companies cleaning crews by Jessica Moore Trash Think about it: every night your office cleaning crew comes through and empties every trash bin. What usually happens is that the crew simply removes the plastic bag, with waste, and replaces it with a new bag. If you work in an office with 100 people, that is 500 plastic bags a week. What about the waste in those bags. How much trash accumulates in a day? Maybe a paper cup from coffee that morning (hopefully not)? Maybe envelopes and catalogs from vendors (but I know you’re already recycling your paper)? Maybe the remnants of your lunch? All in all, it’s not a lot of waste. What should be happening is changing your co-workers minds about daily disposal. We’ve talked about eliminating those paper cups. Encourage your cube mates to get in the habit of putting paper in recycle bins. Does your office have enough bins? Put a paper bin by the mail boxes; give a small box to new employees at orientation; are there enough bins for secured documents to be shredded? As for the plastic bags? SC&H Group coordinated with the cleaning crew and employees to re-think waste disposal and collection. Members of their Green Committee met with cleaning staff and requested to have trash collected only on Friday – except when a bin was left outside an office or cube. The team sent out an email and passed out magnets for reminders for the new protocol, and encouraged co-workers to put lunch items in communal bins (such as in the kitchen) that would be collected daily. And if you needed your trash removed before Friday, move the bin outside your office or cube. By streamlining the waste removal process, SC&H greatly reduced the number of plastic bags used per week. Sanitizing As consumers, we know to look for the “Green Seal Certified” logo for cleaning products in our own homes. What about at work? What exactly is in those industrial cleaners used in the common areas? Who’s in charge of purchasing cleaning products? You’re going to have to do some ground work to find out who in your company coordinates with the cleaning crew. They will have to be on board to negotiate changes – you might have to be compelling, not everyone acts globally like you. Sometimes, the cleaning crews bring all of their own cleaning products, other times your company’s supplies manager maintains the products. Make suggestions for specific products to all of the parties involved. Some resolutions can include your company providing the cleaning products, or having the cleaning crew convert all of their products to more environmentally friendly cleaning products. And remember, if you don’t succeed this time, you have helped start the ball rolling for better green thinking.
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