Save The Planet : Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

With climate change and the future of the planet on everyone’s mind, many people feel they could or should be doing more. You’ve probably already ditched the plastic bags and are drinking drinks with paper straws, but what else can you do? How can you incorporate saving the planet where you spend most of your time…at work? And how can you have a little fun with it?

Share The Journey

Carpooling is an easy way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and according to the daily green, if you join just one other person on a 50-mile round-trip drive to and from work, you’ll reduce your monthly emissions by almost 10 percent. That’s a lot from not having to do much.

Car sharing with a colleague can be really fun too, either you and your mate get extra time to chat before you get to the office or you might find that you make a new friend with someone who you don’t usually spend much time with. There are some car-sharing apps now too, so have a look at those and see if you can implement a car-sharing scheme at work and see if you can use incentives to encourage all your colleagues to do the same. 

Encourage Your Clients

Make sure your clients know what you’re doing to help to save the planet. Let them know of your efforts and find out what initiatives they do at work. When it comes to merchandise, choose tote bags, water bottles or click here to look at promotional travel mugs which you can give as gifts to your clients at the same time as promoting your business and saving the planet.

Work From Home

If you can work from home just for one day a week, then you’ll be saving on energy instead of doing your usual commute. While there are some arguments against this though as some say that employees who work at home spend extra time turning on lights, opening refrigerator doors, running the dishwasher, etc. So, if you do work from home, then be aware of that and try not to offset the energy you have saved or you could go for another eco-friendly option which is to join or create a co-working space so that telecommuters can confine their energy usage to a single room or building close to home.

Save the planet! Eat Leftovers

The amount of global food waste produced each year is more than enough to feed the nearly 1 billion hungry people in the world. The food we don’t eat and end up throwing away usually ends up in landfills and eventually turns into a destructive greenhouse gas called methane. Also, wasting food means squandering resources such as water and energy that go into the production of that food. Don’t waste food from dinner; eat the leftovers for your lunch the next day.

If you’ve got more than enough, then bring lunch in for everyone. Instead of leaving food to expire, be more aware of what’s in your fridge and if you’re not going to eat it, then bring it into work to see if anyone else wants it. If you start doing that it might encourage others to do the same. You could even have one day a week where everyone brings some leftovers or food about to expire in, and all have lunch together to eat everything up. It could make for a very interesting pot-luck lunch buffet.

Have A Vegetarian Day

You don’t have to give up meat for life, but cutting down can make a massive difference to the planet. Try to commit to one meat-free day a week and encourage everyone to do the same throughout your office. Get creative with vegetarian dishes and again this is something you can share within the office and have a bit of fun with.

Save the planet! Recycle

While everyone’s pretty good at recycling now, we still need to do more and save more energy. Learn more about what you can and can’t recycle in the office and ways to do it. Again, use incentives to encourage others to do it too and make it fun for everyone.

One thing you can do is to remove desk bins as studies show that we can reach a 60% recycle rate when disposing of our rubbish correctly in the appropriate bins rather than simply throwing it in the closest bin next to us – this also gets people up and moving rather than sitting all day.