12 Quick and Easy Ways to a Much Greener Office

Julie Starr • October 15, 2021



The issues of sustainability and eco-friendly workplaces are at the forefront of a cleaner tomorrow. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. Therefore your office and work environment can be the shining example you want to see in the world. There are many easy ways to a much greener office, such as transportation alternatives, encouraging recycling, and low-power electrical devices. 

Implementing all the below examples is easy in theory. Yet, some people may need a little nudge to change their habits. Yet with time and patience, your employees will work together to reduce your carbon footprint dramatically. 

Low Power Computing

Suppose you employ a large team working to generate high-profile sustainability blogs with robust SEO services . In that case, you need to use computers and laptops. Unfortunately, many of these are power-hungry energy hogs. Yet you can install low-power PCs such as Fit-PC Slim, Aleutia E2, and Advent Eco PC. These slimmer and less intensive devices are compact, produce less noise, and require minimal power amounts of between 6 and 50 watts.

Waste Sorting

Landfills are burdened by mixed trash and recyclable materials that otherwise could have gone somewhere else. Conversely, receiving centers get inundated with trash they cannot process. You can help with this issue by implementing a presorting trash system in the office. This way, food garbage, recyclable materials, and garbage are ready for correct distribution where they need to go. Bins are cheap and readily available, and you need to enforce usage policies.

The Paperless Office

Bill Gates’ dream of the paperless office hasn’t quite arrived. Yet, there are some things you can easily do to reduce your usage of paper significantly. First, if something doesn’t need to be printed, then don’t print it. For example, a memo can just as quickly be emailed to whom it concerns rather than sending each person a printed letter. It’s also easy to collaborate on documents electronically using apps like Flock, Stack, and Microsoft Teams.

Car Pooling

There are just too many cars on the road. Personal vehicles account for the vast majority, and encouraging carpooling will help reduce everyone’s carbon footprint. Of course, not everyone likes this idea, yet you could incentivize people to take part. Perhaps organic gift vouchers, cash bonuses, or small gifts or recognition. Some may not like it at first, but it’s also a great way to promote interoffice socializing among employees and coworkers.

Electric Vehicles

Although EVs come with a manufacturing carbon footprint, once you have purchased one, the carbon footprint is much lower than using a standard gas vehicle. This is mainly offset because an EV has zero emissions while in use and is potentially the answer to the road congestion and smog pollution problem. Although charging your electric vehicle does have a carbon footprint attached if your energy supplier uses fossil fuels.

Cycling and Walking

The minor polluting modes of transportation are cycling and walking. These have a zero carbon footprint, and both are incredibly healthy. But, unfortunately, it isn’t viable for everyone to cycle or walk to work. Some employees might live too far away, and some may have medical issues. Yet, for those who are able, you should heavily encourage sustainable practices like these as an excellent way to reduce an individual’s carbon footprint concerning their work.

Public Transport

For those too far to walk or cycle, and where there is no carpooling available, public transport like buses and trains are an excellent option. Most trains use electricity to move, and almost every bus company is electrifying their vehicles. This means that although there are many uses on the roads, most of them are non-polluting. In addition, buses are much more comfortable than they used to be, so no excuses for a bumpy ride.

Encourage Reusables

Manufacturing and service companies all over the world are making the shift towards ditching single-use plastics. Reusable items are the current hot topic, and these should be encouraged at work. Coffee cups and water bottles are easiest to encourage as they are cheap and everyone needs them. Even Costa Coffee and Starbucks sell reusable coffee cups, while Bevi’s bottle-less water coolers reduce plastic bottle waste.

Renovate with Low Power Electrics

Like computers, you can replace many things throughout the office with low-power versions. Lighting is one of the worst culprits for using energy, not least because people tend to leave them on when not in use. However, LED lights last longer, emit no heat, and use up to 90% less energy. They are vastly more efficient than traditional incandescent or fluorescent lighting solutions commonly found in office buildings.

Reduce Phantom Power

In addition to low-power PCs and LED lighting, you can reduce power consumption more with intelligent power sockets. When a device is left in and switched off, it can still draw power from an outlet. This is known as phantom power . Smart power extensions detect which resources do this and completely shut them off so they don’t continually use power when they shouldn’t. This means you won’t have to manually unplug all devices when you go home for the weekend.

Make Use of Natural Light and Heat

Get rid of the blinds where they aren’t needed and let the sunshine in. Blinds and curtains will block sunlight, which is a shame since more sunlight means switching off the lights and possibly the heating. Sunlight lets in much light, and you can use this to your advantage during the day. But depending on the type of glass your windows are made from, you can also get much heat from sunlight, even in the winter.

Educate About Sustainability

Finally, none of these efforts are worth it if no one will implement them or follow advice. Of course, not everyone will become an eco-warrior. However, by making just a few of these changes, the collective efforts of everyone combined will contribute significantly to reducing your company’s carbon footprint. It would also be helpful to set up a green team. This team can enforce and analyze green policies and come up with new ideas for a greener workplace.

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.