How Greener Practices Can Save Your Business Money

This is a guest post from blogger and friend of Our Green Directory, Elizabeth Reed. We have an open door policy for guest blogger. As long as it’s green, interesting and informative we’re happy to post.

No one goes into business to lose money on purpose. As we live in the digital age, there are many ways we can save money around the office while improving efficiency. Practicing “greener” ways of doing business can keep more money available for the things you need. This doesn’t mean you need to sign up with Green Peace or other organizations, but you may need to change your point of view in order to implement some of these ideas.

1. Conversion to Paperless – Much of what we do in today’s world is paperless as it is. Using email, you can eliminate a great deal of the paper that your business goes through. How far can you take a paperless system?

• Accounting software that uses email to send invoices and transactions
• Time card systems for employees that are based on a computer system
• Emphasize email for sending memos throughout your organization
• Payment acceptance systems that email receipts instead of printing them

These are just a few implementations you can enact that could save your business money in both paper and ink. Each one can also be considered more efficient in its own right due to the fact that man-hours are no longer needed to maintain them.

2. Computer Systems – Although new computers are being built to be more energy efficient than those of old, powering down these devices at night can save money on your energy bills. This is aside from the wear and tear internal moving components experience as they sit idle. For instance, most cooling fans have a life of 50,000 hours. Once these breakdown, the computer system can easily overheat and cause additional and more expensive damage to repair.

3. Lighting – Motion detection or timed light switches can prevent the occasional “accident” of leaving the lights on in a room. Many businesses have moved to installing motion detecting switches in the bathrooms and break rooms in order to reduce the energy waste. It makes no sense to leave lights on in an area if no one is there to use them. While it may only be one room, the energy wasted throughout the year can easily add up. Timed light switches are common in areas such as storage units where motion is common in the outdoors. As a cat or dog could set off a motion light, a timed switch will turn itself off until a patron needs to access a unit.

There are many ways that a business can save money by practicing greener methods. In fact, some have even gone so far as to make money by recycling specific products. Regardless of your company’s focus, green innovation allows you to find a better approach to operations that save money. Not only can you do your part in protecting the environment you live in, but you can protect your company’s assets while doing so.

Author Bio:

Elizabeth Reed is a freelance writer and a resident blogger at Liveinnanny.org. She particularly enjoys writing about parenting, childcare, health and wellness. In addition, she is an expert consultant on issues related to household management and kids.

Teaching Children About Renewable Energy Through Kits

This is a guest post by Liz Nelson from WhiteFence.com. She is a freelance writer and blogger from Houston. Questions and comments can be sent to: liznelson17 @ gmail.com.

While building your own solar array to provide enough power to your home to be 100-percent sustainable could cost tens of thousands of dollars, you don’t need a lot of money to teach children how it works and why it’s important. In fact, there are a lot of kits on the market that can serve semi-practical uses while demonstrating to the kids the mechanics of it all. Most of these kits cost less than $150 and can provide a wealth of knowledge for green sustainability.

1. Solar Arrays – The solar panel kit offered by HarborFreight.com produces 45 watts of power while providing the capabilities to power small 12-volt devices. It also supports the use of 5 volt USB devices such as phone charges and other USB electronics normally purchased for computers. This kit can be expanded on by combing more panels together while using a deep cycle battery and an inverter – both are sold separately. This is a fun and quick project for your children to assemble and can be utilized in many ways for practicality such as camping or tied into your home power needs. The kit itself is less than $250.

2. Wind Turbines – For less than $130, you could demonstrate to your children the power of wind turbines from KidWind.com. These wind turbines can be purchased as small single units to elaborate classroom kits, each turbine producing as much as two watts of power. These kits are tailored specifically for children and include easy to follow instructions in order to assemble them. Although they may not have the maximum production value of power as the solar kit listed above, they can easily be used to demonstrate how humans can harness natural sources of energy without consuming fuels to do so.

3. Small Solar Panels – For those who don’t want to spend a great deal of money teaching their children about solar power, LegacyStation.com offers an inexpensive kit to power several different projects. This 6-in-1 kit is under $20 and can demonstrate how to use solar power in order to create vehicles or propulsion systems in aircraft. These are easy to assemble and will provide a great deal of entertainment without the use of a single battery. Of course, there is nothing wrong with modification of any project should you want to demonstrate how solar arrays can power an object while charging a battery in order for the object to continue functionality when solar power is low. This would only require the use of a battery pack and rechargeable batteries that can be picked up from Radio Shack for less than $20.

4. Pressurized Power – While solar and wind are two of the most popular and practical methods for renewable energy sources, NationalGeographic.com has made an air and water power kit to teach children about how pressure can be used to power a variety of machines including vehicles. The kit allows children to build 15 different vehicles all powered by hydro-pneumo technologies. Pressurized air and water can be used as a form of propulsion, and the kit costs less than $50.

Getting your children excited about renewable energies now increases the knowledge they will have later. As technology develops to make these sources more efficient, preparing our future through educating our young will only increase the likelihood of total global sustainability in the decades to come. Your child may very well be the innovator that history remembers for delivering the perfected system – all from the kits they put together at 10 years old.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are always receptive to having people create guest blogs for us, as the influx of opinions always makes for interesting reading.

The Heinz ‘Plant Bottle’ – A Squirt In The Right Direction

Because of its icon value, the ubiquitous Heinz Ketchup bottle is hardly thought of any sort of ecological marvel. In fact, you might tend to think of the millions of plastic ketchup bottle scattered around the known universe in pantries, grocery stores, restaurant and condiment tables as pretty much part of the problem.

You Can Judge This Book By Its Cover

I was jonesing for some ribs on New Years eve so off we went to the only place I was sure we could get a table, good old Swiss Chalet. While we were waiting for our festive feast the Heinz ketchup bottle on the table caught my eye.  With the intriguing headline: “Guess What My Bottle Is Made Of and a superfluous ‘?’ (because it wasn’t actually a question), I read on nonetheless and discovered that this bottle and zillions others like it, is made from up to 30% renewable resources. Now this may not strike you as a big deal until you do the math and realize that the Heinz company is making a very substantial sustainability statement here.

Plant Bottle? I Don’t Know…Maybe.

You might take a bit of exception to them calling this bottle a ‘Plant Bottle’, but its clear that their collective hearts are in the right place going forward. So kudos, (with a small ‘k’) to the Heinz Company, for giving it a good shot. Let’s hope they keep moving in this direction and  that this initiative sets and example that other packaged goods producers will follow

More info on the Heinz ‘Plant Bottle’ is available here:

http://www.heinz.com/CSR2011/environment/packaging_materials.aspx