When people ask me how to begin reporting in their sustainability initiatives, I provide them with the typical consulting answer- it depends. It depends because of several things. Good sustainability reporting requires good measurements. When you start creating a baseline to begin measuring, one wants to make sure you can easily keep up with the reporting and monitor the progress. For companies that own their own buildings and pay their utilities, energy conservation and improvements goals are achievable. For companies that rent space and the landlord pays for energy and water consumption, it is much harder to report on energy conservation or measure improvement, therefore energy savings may not be a realistic goal or item to measure.
As we know in all aspects of business, what gets measured gets done. Therefore being able to measure your impact validates your businesses integrity.
To simply get started take a look at these office functions and see if they might apply to your business:
- Eliminate Plastic Water Bottles:
- Use pitchers of water in conference room meetings instead of water bottles.
Use reusable pitchers with the company name on them. This is a great branding opportunity and a real example of how you support sustainability in your office. Give these pitchers to clients when they come in for a visit.
- Use pitchers of water in conference room meetings instead of water bottles.
- Reduce Paper use:
- Set printers to double sided printing.
- Invest in printers that print on both sides.
- Set benchmarks to measure this reduction and report on it each month.
- Recycle:
- Recycle bins should be placed at each employees desk.
- Make recycling easy.
- Make it meaningful. Donate can tops to charities collecting them.
- If you can weigh what you recycle, this weight can be used as a measurement to reduce waste. We diverted xyz pounds of material from a landfill by recycling.
