Please consider the environment before printing this post

The other day saw a very interesting and heated debate over a hot topic on one of my green business lists - the addition of that little line at the end of e-mail signatures that asks you to "please consider the environment before printing this e-mail." Or it says to "Think Green! Don't Print This E-mail!" Or it says any other of a seemingly endless number of iterations of this single thought: don't waste so much paper.

While I understand the idea, and appreciate it, my objection to these lines is a few-fold:

1. It assumes that I, the reader, am going to print this e-mail, even if it's just a quick confirmation on something. I'm not.
2. What if I actually NEED to print the e-mail? The only things I print are receipts, directions, or e-mails that have significant history information related to projects I'm in the middle of at the zen kitchen. This is a total of about 10-15% of my e-mail. Everything else gets deleted or put into a folder. Should I feel like I'm somehow not "considering the environment" because I need paper records of these things? 
3. While e-mail signatures can be a truly helpful marketing tool, we seem to have reached an age where signatures have gone completely out of hand. People are busy, and while an e-mail signature is a great way to give people the basic information they need to check out your business and contact you, adding a bunch of stuff to the end of your signature dilutes your message, clogs their e-mail and, if they DO need to print it, adds to the amount of paper they need to print. How is that "green?"

Finally, while the issue of office waste is definitely vast, it's been my experience at least that much of that waste isn't because people are printing their e-mails. In some cases yes, high-level executives will have their assistants print every e-mail - either because they don't "get" the e-mail system or because the assistants vet their e-mails and print just the important ones. But this is a systemic issue, and telling the assistants (the people actually printing the e-mails) not to print isn't helping anything - they don't have a choice. Further, if an executive truly doesn't "get" how e-mail works, how will seeing that little line at the bottom of a printed page help? Wouldn't it be better to have a conversation and show him how e-mail works? Or better yet, have the assistant vet all the e-mails according to importance and then let the executive view it? 

The point here is that, in the 10 years that I spent in various capacities at offices all over New England before starting the zen kitchen, the tremendous amount of paper waste I saw rarely came from e-mail. Rather, it came from:

1. The endless number of forms that were often required to get anything done (the average office I worked in had at least 5-10 forms to fill out depending on what you needed done, and they were always looking to create more forms for things)
2. In the case of design studios/ad agencies/art departments, printing a new iteration of a brochure/layout/etc. *every* time they made a change to it, no matter how minor. In some places, you even had to print multiples, which would be distributed among various people in the organization. I once had to print out a new 12*18 sheet for a layout edit that included adding a comma. Really. Nothing more - just a comma. 
   
3. In the case of mortgage/banking companies (where I worked as an admin assistant before deciding to become a designer - way back in '97-'98), it was filling out a 15-page thick pile of forms just to get a loan package started, then having to make two copies of each package, copies of the related documentation, etc.

Notice, please - none of this involves printing e-mails. So who is that line really helping?

Inside the Sustainable Studio: creating a great (and green!) home office

As both the proprietress of a green business and one of the lucky thousands (maybe millions now?) who are able to work from home, I've been thinking a lot about ways to green my office. Some are fairly obvious: recycle paper, don't print as much, use CFLs, blah blah. But both the challenge and the blessing of the home office is that it's completely yours - you get to do whatever you want to it, and set it up in the way that works best for you. This, oddly enough, is a pretty tall order.

After three years running the zen kitchen out of various home offices (and two years before that moonlighting in Cranston, RI), I've learned the following about balancing sustainability with form/function:

• Natural light is essential. Working in a place with plenty of windows (like my current office, which is basically a closed-in porch banked with windows) not only helps the environment by reducing the amount of energy you need to run lights, etc. it's good for the soul. I can't imagine working by office light anymore. 

• Create a pretty space, using low-VOC paint. It's amazing what a coat of paint will do, and using a low-VOC paint (they're all over the place now) costs a bit more, but it gives you the advantage of being able to actually breathe while you're painting with it. I painted my office on the hottest weekend of the year and there was no paint smell whatsoever while I was doing it. Not only is this better for the environment, it lets you get back to work quickly because your house doesn't reek of fresh paint.

• Make meals in advance for the week. It's hard to get motivated to cook a meal in the middle of the day, which makes the temptation for take-out (and all the containers!) a bit too hard to resist. I've found that having things like brown rice, lentils, etc. handy in the fridge makes it much easier to throw something together. Not only does it save plastic, it saves money.

• Print as much as you can on an as-needed basis. Business cards are important to have on hand (and designed/printed professionally!) but there are certain things, like letterhead, envelopes, etc. that you might not need a lot of. These, I've found, can fairly easily be worked into templates to print as-needed on an inkjet or laser printer without hampering your professional image. That said, it's important to assess your actual stationery needs before embarking on a process like this; short-run printing is expensive, and if you use a lot of letterhead or envelopes on a daily basis, definitely get them printed.

• Gang up errands and meetings so you drive less. This is as much a time-management tip as it is a green tip - traveling to meetings and such is an enormous time suck. I tend to group weekly appointments or meetings with my trips to the gym or other errands, so I block specific periods of time to be out of the office, and bring my gym bag along with me.

Any other telecommuters have green tips to share?

Green the office coffee station

Okay, yes, I drink my coffee at home now - but as someone who spent years in a variety of office parks doing design for major companies, I know a thing or two about the Office Coffee Station. It seems that everyone does them differently - some serve great coffee, some serve this odd sludge; some have plenty of reusable dishes available for use, others make you use styrofoam (gasp!), or those individual plastic cups of grounds (which I personally refuse to use).

So how do you up the green factor in the office coffee/lunch station?

From what I've noticed, the goal in greening office areas is to make it very easy for folks to make greener choices (i.e. without really noticing a difference); otherwise, you create a situation that a busy manager, for example, can't deal with, and you end up with folks opting for Starbucks instead of drinking coffee in the office. The goal is to give people plenty of options, so it's easy to make the right choice.

My thoughts (and these are just thoughts, mind):
• unbleached, biodegradable coffee/tea filters;
• clearly marked compost bins (with signs that say "coffee grounds/teabags go here") that are emptied daily by someone (to avoid nasty odors);
• provide plenty of reusable mugs and glasses for folks (can't count on people to bring their own) - refuse to use paper/plastic cups;
• choose fair trade coffee/tea (but expect that a few folks are going to randomly bring in their Lipton);
• choose local dairy from smaller farms (most use organic practices, even if they aren't certified) in cartons rather than the little "mini-moos" so many office parks are stocked with;
• raw sugar in a jar instead of sugar packets;
• plenty of reusable spoons/silverware (this is especially handy if the coffee area is also a lunch-storage area, as many are).

And of course, on an individual level, you can just opt to bring your own coffee in a travel mug each morning - which is actually preferable to the coffee in some offices (ahem!).

So what do you think? How many things can you add to this list?