Green Office Week final day – Innovation means making a difference in sustainability

Green Office Week comes to a close today with ideas around Innovation but we all understand that successful sustainability strategies go beyond the occasional initiative.

This is not to deride the excellent work of the Green Office Week team at office supplies company Avery, far from it. We think the past five days have been a brilliant boost to working-life awareness and have offered many practical ways to change office culture for the better.

We’ve shared our ideas daily this week and hope that they have helped in providing innovative roadmaps to sustainability in companies around the UK. We have focused on simple, small solutions that reduce carbon footprint while saving a lot of money.

Products such as tap aerators, eco taps and eco shower heads make a big difference to water use and cut carbon by reducing the energy needed to heat that water.

LED light solutions are almost a “no brainer” for companies that want to make savings and see their carbon footprint reduced. None of these innovative solutions will “break the bank”. In fact, they pay back outlay very quickly and then go on saving companies a lot of money month on month, year on year.

We have effective, innovative solutions in other areas as well, from ways to make boilers far more efficient to optimised heating and ventilation. Again, both of these repay the investment quickly and continue to contribute to the bottom line after that.

Innovation, as Avery suggests in its guidance today, is also about changing people’s minds. The company asks people to become “eco-warriors” in the workplace, making suggestions, checking whether everything is being done to ensure sustainability and grouping together with other like-minded workers to help this process.

And that signals to us the need for companies to revisit their Corporate Social Responsibility strategies because without a proactive approach, the energy of the green champions in organisations will dissipate.

We shared some ideas around this in a recent post, following an illuminating meeting in London with some of the key players in the Corporate Social Responsibility field. The meeting reinforced our commitment to helping organisations reshape their CSR strategies and go beyond the “tick in the box” or “just enough” mind-set when dealing with Sustainability.

We think that Sustainability should be very high on the agendas of every CSR team, not least because effective policies that blend environmental benefits with sound business sense and empower the internal “green champions” will help companies and, indeed all organisations to face the enormous challenges of the next 20 years. You can find out more about Green Office Week here

If you have any questions or want to find out more about our money saving, carbon cutting solutions, just contact us or call us on 0845 123 5464.