How to Get Started with Office Sustainability
TL;DR: How to Get Started with Office Sustainability
Don’t overthink it — start small, stay consistent, and build from there.
Audit your current impact. List what you're already doing and where you're falling short.
Look local. Research community programs and partners who can support sustainability efforts.
Reduce single-use items. Switch to reusable dishes and utensils, and rethink your packaging.
Get recycling right. Educate your team on local recycling rules and add better sorting bins.
Go energy-efficient. Upgrade lighting to LEDs and consider motion sensors.
Compost if you can. Reduce methane emissions and landfill use with a simple office compost bin.
Find legit recyclers. Seek out partners who can responsibly handle tricky items like e-waste and plastic film.
Be patient. ESG isn't built in a day. Tackle one project at a time and keep going
Two years ago we were presented a challenge by our company president to form a plan to reduce our global carbon footprint and determine our impacts in environmental, social, and governance (ESG). We were in a good position to start this project as we had already been practicing many “green” initiatives long before ESG was a buzzword, but this offered us an opportunity to officially up our game in reducing our environmental impact.
We began the process by researching what others in our industry were doing, and finding resources to help us make decisions about logical next steps to lessen our impact. We also began measuring and diligently recording the efforts we were already implementing, such as shipping products in minimal packaging with no harmful dyes and an ongoing reduction in single-use plastics, growing our recycle program to help our customers properly recycle their broken headsets, as well as making energy-efficient improvements to our Vancouver, WA headquarters.
This audit of our current practices combined with reasonable next steps formed the basis of our plan. Read on for actionable tips to help you get started with your own company ESG initiatives.
We ship products in minimal packaging that contains no harmful dyes with an ongoing reduction in single use plastics packaging. We already started a headset recycle program to reduce our product's end of life environmental impact. We had already installed motion sensor activated LEDs in the warehouse.
Determine your impact:
In order to know what you need to reduce you must first measure and understand your impacts. Once you start taking stock of what you impact it is much easier to strategize and determine what to do next. For this process our research led us to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a standard widely used to help organizations understand and act on the full range of its impacts, to form our ESG task force, determine our stakeholders, track our various impacts, and begin to frame our plan of action.
Once we had taken inventory of all points of impact we could determine ways to reduce those impacts. If a lot of this seems like common sense, that’s because it is.. Take single-use plastics in packaging. What purpose does it serve to produce a package that lasts forever, especially when it’s actually costlier than notably more sustainable packaging options like cardboard? As a result, we eliminated plastic waste and reduced the costs of the product with one fell swoop, which immediately benefited our customers and the environment.
Notably, the GRI only provides a framework that can be used to report on your impacts but it doesn’t give you direction on how to reduce impacts. It also doesn’t opine if an impact is good or bad. For these decisions and setting goals you will need to do more research. We use a variety of sources to guide decisions including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We also found a local certification group, Clark County GreenBiz, to partner with.
Certification search: Finding the right certifications and partners
We investigated many certifications for sustainability and were disappointed to learn that many certifications are pay to play, requiring large sums of money, that appear to be a way to buy your way into sustainability for the benefits of gaining a badge for e-commerce.
Some of these badge providers even require commissions from your sales. For us, this wasn’t about creating the illusion of being a sustainable brand. It was to be better stewards to the world we rely on for survival.
Armed with this knowledge, we decided to look for local certification options, which led us to Clark County Green Biz, an organization that is coordinated by Vancouver, WA Clark County Public Health’s solid waste and environmental outreach. Clark County Green Biz did an onsite inspection of our offices and helped us identify easy changes we could make to reduce our local impact.
Here are a few of the changes that almost any office can implement
Recycle training: Recycling can be different from county to county. Most curbside recyclers struggle with people putting the wrong kinds of recycling into the curbside bins. This causes unnecessary waste and can easily be fixed by training in the office. We taught our team how to recycle properly here in Vancouver using resources provided by Waste Connections. We also created a recycle collection system in our warehouse for employees to bring hard to recycle items like grocery bags, certain types of plastics, and e-waste. We also added more bins for recycling in the break room with clear labeling for what goes into which bin. Your local recycle community might even have one shot classes and outreach education available.
Break room: Our break room was a place that became a focus point. Before our inspection with Clark County GreenBiz we used paper plates and “biodegradable plastic” or, even worse, single-use plastic utensils that last forever in a landfill. Replacing all single use utensils and dishes with reusable, washable options was an easy swap, but left us with the challenge of whose responsibility it would be to keep them clean. So we also installed an energy-efficient dishwasher to make the process of reusing dishes in the workplace easy and sustainable. We even purchased customized coffee mugs for all employees and reusable K-cups for our coffee machine.
Composting: Starting a compost bin in the break room was an easy way to reduce our garbage output even further. In our county, compost goes into the yard debris curbside bin and is used to make compost that returns valuable nutrients to the earth, or it is used as fuel as an alternative energy resource. Composting prevents methane emissions in landfills. When things break down they release methane regardless,but when organic materials break down in landfills those gases get trapped under all the non-organic materials like plastics. Composting reduces the greenhouse gas emissions by about 80% and reduces the need for landfills to drill out these methane pockets.
Lighting: A less simple fix was replacing our halogen lighting in the office with LED lighting. This required an inspection from Clark County Public Utilities and then a contractor to replace the ballasts in the lighting fixtures. Some of these costs were covered by a state rebate incentive program here in Washington. We installed motion sensor LEDs in the warehouse a few years ago and have seen an ongoing dramatic reduction in energy usage.
Finding the right recyclers: Do you recycle? How certain are you that you are recycling properly? There are so many nuances as to what can go into the curbside bin that most of us had been “good faith” recycling many items that are hard to recycle. The nuances vary depending on your local recycle programs and availability. So, it was off to recycle school for us.
We had a walk through and garbage audit with Waste Connections and moreover we attended one of their community classes on recycling.
Once we established what goes in the curbside bin we needed to find a way to recycle our other waste such as shrink wrap from the warehouse, batteries, and random plastics. We already had an e-waste recycler, Green Century Recycling, and as it turns out they recycle a whole lot more than just e-waste. They were able to take all our foam, plastic film, batteries, redundant light bulbs, and even worked with us to take a bulk bin of #1 plastics left over from when we removed our remaining stock of headsets in blister packs.
We sourced a cardboard recycler to handle all of our cardboard which made it so that our dumpster of recycling had been reduced to a curbside sized recycle bin.
We also sourced a recycler who makes bricks from mixed plastics.
By taking the time to research local options, making calls, and networking we were able to significantly reduce our garbage output and were even able to reduce our garbage dumpster to a much smaller unit.
We hope you find this to be a good starting point for your office or company to start on your own sustainability goals. Implementing an ESG program can be an entire full-time position, so if you are taking this on as part of your role, remember to address it regularly with baby steps. Remember to be patient with the process and make steps where you can because even seemingly small changes end up having a big impact on the future.
For more details on our sustainability goals and how we track them, read our most recent ESG Report.