How Can You Make Your Team Greener?

Julie Starr • April 6, 2021



Making your business more environmentally conscious starts with your team. Employees are a company’s most precious asset. But they also represent the best partner in tackling environmental impacts and creating a green workplace. A lot of companies have considered permanently moving to a virtual office setup as a result of the pandemic. Unfortunately, it is fair to say that not every business sector can viably work in a remote setting. Consequently, when a digital workforce isn’t the way forward, you need to focus your green efforts on helping your team on-site become your most significant environmental asset. Here are some of the most commonly overlooked tips and tricks to encourage your team to adopt eco-friendly behaviors. 

Recruit talent that will stay

Not many businesses consider the environmental impact of the recruitment process. Recruiting is an involved process that contributes to high paper and ink use (through printing resumes), increased consumption of energy during the preparation and interview phase, increased travel and carbon emission on the road for recruiters and applicants, high fashion consumption as applicants purchase last-minute outfits to make a good impression. Unfortunately, if your company has a high turnover rate, the environmental impacts of recruitment are constantly repeated. Ideally, a business wants to recruit talent that is going to remain with the company for a long time. This could range from specialist skills such as recruiting experts via h1b sponsorship and niche targeting to introducing apprenticeship and mentoring programs that help staff progress within the company. 

If you are looking for specific types of individuals for your business, then it is worth exploring services such as an investigator. A private investigator can reveal key information about potential employees including how long they tend to stay in a position, whether they feel loyalty to companies they work for, and the type of incentives that are likely to ensure they are content in a business.

Go paperless

Most businesses are familiar with the go paperless claim to reduce their environmental waste. However, many employers are keen to turn a blind eye to paper consumption in the office. There are many reasons for preferring a paper-based work environment. People find it easier to digest printed information or to write down notes with a pen rather than a keyboard. However, what you may not realize is that a single tree results in approximately 110 lbs of CO2 that’s released into the atmosphere. Additionally, every tree that isn’t cut down can absorb CO2 gasses. In other words, every sheet of paper you use in the office has a double negative impact on the environment. It’s time to measure exactly how many trees your office is using in a month with this online calculator . Understanding the real impact of paper can transform your and your employees’ mindset about digital tools.  

Change your restroom supplies

An employee spends approximately 14 minutes in the toilet every day. During this time, they will use toilet paper, wash their hands and dry them. Switching to recycled toilet rolls, soap bars, and paperless hand dryers can make a huge difference to the sustainability of your restrooms. 

Bring green into your office kitchen

The office kitchen generates a lot of trash and garbage throughout the year, from pre-bought lunches to tea bags and organic wastes. It’s a good idea to maximize your bin policy and ensure that the kitchen can cut down unnecessary waste and pressures on the environment. Ideally, with the presence of lunches, fresh fruits and vegetables, and biodegradable coffee pods and tea bags, you want to add a compact bin . This can be repurposed to keep your office garden nourished, for example. 

A green team is the result of commitment, investment, and strategic thinking from the business. You can’t expect your employees to develop sustainable behaviors if you don’t give them the tools to do so. 

 

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.