Get Green and Save Money

Today’s non-profits operate against the backdrop of two major global challenges: climate change and the financial crisis. Can green solutions help non-profits stay afloat financially?

This month’s Net Tuesday tackled this question with a panel of representatives from Carbonzero, the David Suzuki Foundation, and TechSoup Canada.

Measuring your environmental impact - Carbonzero

For many, the relationship between global warming, carbon, and human activity is merely an abstract one — “elusive carbon,” as Howie Chong, puts it. He’s the founder of Carbonzero.ca, a Toronto based firm that’s involved with carbon offsetting.

But the problem is “we don’t really pay attention to what we’re putting into the atmosphere unless we have some way of calculating it,” Chong continues.

To tackle this problem, Carbonzero provides online tools to calculate the impact of various every-day activities. For instance, they estimate that a road trip from Toronto to Barrie would cost .04 tons of carbon emissions.

“By having more information, you’ll be better able to manage what your emissions are over a long period of time.”

Christine Wickett, also of Carbonzero, introduced some practical tips on reducing environmental impact: carpooling, weeding out “vampire watts” from electronics, choosing EnergyStar compliant devices, and eliminating wasteful business practices — single-sided printing, for instance.

Where does the recession fit in?

Says Christine: “Some companies are failing but a lot of green companies are doing well - organizations are realizing that it’s not only necessary for their sustainable standards but also their fiscal standards.”

But at the end of the day, it’s the daily habits that have to be fought. “We want to go green but we’re going against a twenty year habit of printing emails,” someone in the audience complained.

Spurring behaviour change - the David Suzuki Foundation

Katie Harper of the David Suzuki Foundation addressed this challenge: how do you fight the resistance to change that exists in organizations.

“Lots of people are making a difference at home but go to their workplace and its not happening,” she notes. The Foundation’s Nature Challenge at Work program helps with this problem.

She offered some practical tips to spur behaviour change:

• Make the green choice the default choice: Make it take effort to choose the environmentally unfriendly option. Organizations can set printers to print double-sided by default or install motion sensing lights in their offices.
  
• Engage Employees: Start from the bottom and involve everyone in the process. The best people to identify inefficiencies on the ground are the people on the ground.
  
• Give visible feedback: Many companies use metrics from their green programs and base competitions on these numbers, using competition between employees to achieve their goals.
  
• Use prompts: Behaviour change is hard; people always have to reminded. For instance, some companies have set up their computers to ask users “do you really need to print this?” before every job.
  
  
• Showcase our eco-heroes: Behaviour is influenced by the people around us. Showing off those making a difference takes care of the chump factor — the fear of being the only one dragging your recycling out to the curb, for instance.
  
• Make it fun: Nobody likes an eco-bully. If you make people laugh, you make people remember the message.

So what stands to be gained? Money, for one. If a computer costs $165 per year to run for a year and you turn it off at night, you can save more than $100 per year by that one simple act.

“I guarantee that there are inefficiencies in your workplace,” says Katie. Many non-profits in particular have not had the budget to look at their existing processes to root out inefficiencies. “There are many low-hanging fruits.”

Using technology for green improvements - TechSoup Canada

Jane Zhang of TechSoup Canada brought a final set of practical tips on how to you use specific technologies to reduce an organization's environmental impact.

In particular, she highlighted the gains to be had from virtual meetings. Recently, the new TechSoup online platform was coordinated almost exclusively with online conferencing software that engaged teams from locations in North America, India, and Poland. Face-to-face meetings would have been prohibitively expensive and environmentally unfriendly.

This point coincides with TechSoup’s current featured product, ReadyTalk, available for qualified non-profits through the TechSoup Canada Product Donations Program.

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Blog text and photos by: Andrew Louis, http://hyfen.net