Greening Your Home Office

By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Being a professional in the working world today is tough. Between clients, business meetings, and family, very few women have the time or energy to take on extra projects. Recent surveys have shown that the green movement is slowly finding its way into corporate offices. If major corporations can find the time and resources to “greenovate” during these trying economic times, there’s no excuse as to why your home office can’t get an eco-friendly facelift of its own.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 million Americans work from home a couple of days a week. Essentially, that means the added energy use from lights and office equipment and extra paper consumption from faxes, sticky-notes, and computer printouts is taking its toll on the environment as we speak. The idea of turning your home office into an efficient, eco-friendly workspace may seem overwhelming at first, but rest assured it’s not as difficult or time-consuming as you may think. Taking the time to consider a few minor adjustments will make a big difference in your life and to the lifespan of the planet.

Greening your home office doesn’t have to entail an entire overhaul that takes weeks to complete. As a matter of fact, getting rid of your old things is wasteful and defeats the purpose of greening. You don’t have to rip out your carpet and replace it with cork flooring or ditch all of your office furniture for new hemp furniture. Kelly LaPlante, celebrity interior designer, owner of Organic Interior Design in Venice Beach, CA, and author of écologique: The Style of Sustainable Design, knows green design inside and out and says one of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to throw out all of your non-green items and start from scratch. “You can’t green your office from the perspective that you’re going to buy all new eco-products. The greenest thing you can do is nothing at all. Keep what you already have and don’t send things off to a landfill and contribute to the environmental impact that new production has on the environment. Start with the principal of reusing or repurposing already existing items in new and interesting ways,” LaPlante said. Bookshelves can be painted, existing chairs can be upholstered in organic fabrics, walls can be painted with low VOC paints- you get the idea.

Greening your office can also take place on a very small scale. For example, if you’re working from your home office one day, rather than flipping on a light switch, open a window and utilize natural sunlight. Studies show that sunlight has a calming, clarifying effect on mood and concentration. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, people who work in daylight experience an increase in general well-being and productivity.

If sunlight’s not for you, switch out all of your old incandescent light bulbs with Energy Star qualified compact fluorescent light bulbs. Energy Star bulbs use 75 percent less energy than standard light bulbs and last ten times longer. It has been reported that if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars. “I have worked with clients that do not have windows in their home offices,” LaPlante said, “Aside from energy efficient lighting, I would also recommend focusing on the indoor air quality in the office. Bring in air-cleansing plants, such as a Boston fern, and make sure that the HVAC system is running clean and efficient and pumping in fresh air from outdoors.”

The next area of your office you can tackle is the supplies and phasing out paper is a good place to start. Not only will you clear the clutter off your desk, but signing up for e-billing will greatly reduce the amount of paper that leaves your home office and ends up in landfills. You may not be able to make bills disappear, but you can make paper bills disappear by signing up for e-billing with credit and utility companies. Also, if old files are taking up precious home office space, recycle them or shred them to use as packing material.

To bind documents, try staple-less staplers- yes, they do exist. These fun, futuristic-looking “staplers” poke a neat hole into the page and then fold the punched-through paper flap over pages to secure them. If you need to file important papers, use TerraCycle eco-binders, which are made of 100 percent recycled paper and 90 percent recycled steel. You can even make a green choice when picking your writing utensil. It is estimated that more than 10 million plastic pens go to the landfill each year. Write right by using refillable, recyclable plastic pens. Pilot has a BeGreen line of pens that is made with nearly 90 percent recycled content.

As you can see, greening your home office doesn’t have to be a hectic, expensive, or overwhelming ordeal. Making a few minor adjustments to already-existing office items and using your purchasing power to support green initiatives will whip your home office into a mean, green, fighting machine in no time.