Inspiring Office Sustainability: Creating A Green Team

Green Team Basics

Are you looking to reduce waste at your office and build a thriving team culture? A Green Team may be the answer! In fact, research shows that 70% of workers favor employers with a strong environmental ethos, and many millennials would even take a pay cut to work at a sustainable company. An office Green Team can serve as the management/staff liaison for sustainability activities. A Green Team should be responsible for conducting waste audits, brainstorming ways for the office to become more sustainable, identifying best practices and solutions, and supporting employee education and engagement efforts. Empowering employees to take the lead on your office’s sustainability initiatives not only builds culture and awareness, it motivates and engages staff by giving a greater sense of purpose to their job.

Employee Footprint

Employee participation is critical to the success of any initiative to reduce an office’s single-use plastic and waste footprint. Educating your employees about the issue of plastic pollution and providing context to your initiative will build the conservation mindset necessary to achieve your plastic and waste reduction goals. For example, employees often bring in lunches from home or order lunch or beverages from a nearby restaurant, and the packaging and to go ware containers and utensils that come with these meals add to the environmental footprint of the office. You can encourage employee participation in reducing the office’s single-use plastic footprint in various ways:

• Start an employee challenge and offer sustainable prizes as rewards to participation.

• Provide employees with reusable water bottles, coffee cups and utensils.

• Create a list of local restaurants/coffee shops that use environmentally friendly to go ware and post it in an employee breakroom or dining area.

• Terracycle has a recycling program to take back hard to recycle items such as granola bar wrappers, chip bags and gloves. Consider purchasing one of their zero waste recycling boxes for employee breakrooms or dining areas.

The team at PPS has extensive experience helping our clients’ build a culture of conservation with their employees. We are available to lead employee lunch & learns, sustainability training sessions, advise on Green Team structure and activities, conduct waste audits and more! Give us a call for more information on how we can help you create a Green Team or implement sustainability initiatives in your office.