Alan Greene, M.D., is a beloved practicing pediatrician, leading authority, and spokesperson for the green baby movement. Named "the Children's Health Hero of the Internet" by Intel, Dr. Greene teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine.
As Past President of The Organic Center, founding partner of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment and an Advisory Board member of Healthy Child Healthy World, Dr. Greene has an impressively green resume – and a wonderfully down-to-earth perspective. That could be because he has four children himself.
"In my job as a pediatrician at Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University School of Medicine over the last ten years, I've seen how clinical experience, science, research, and technology have increased the choices that doctors and parents can make," says Dr. Greene. "But there’s also an important new set of choices parents can make that can have a beneficial impact on the environment."
Many of us have home offices, particularly when there’s a new baby in the house and we want to stay close by. These home offices also provide more opportunities to conserve power. Here are a few eco-friendly ways to cut your electricity bill, conserve energy and resources, be a good role model for your children, and protect the planet:
Use Energy Star equipment. Using an Energy Star computer, monitor, printer, and fax can conserve enough electrical power to light your entire home for more than four years.1
Power down. Turn off your office equipment when you’re not working there. Set your computer for “sleep” mode when not in use for ten minutes. Activating sleep settings on just one computer can prevent about three hundred pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Using power management on your desktop computer could save nine hundred kilowatt-hours per year. That amounts to fifteen hundred pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of driving a medium-sized car from New York to Salt Lake City!2
Buy recycled supplies. Copy paper, envelopes, calendars, planners, and stationery are all available in paper made from 100 percent post-consumer recycled content; remanufactured ink and laser toner for printers and fax machines are also available.
Reduce your use. There are many ways to cut back on paper use: keep only electronic files of notes and memos; print double sided; use the back of draft copies for scrap paper; change the margin settings to get more text per page; edit on screen rather than on hard copy.
Reuse. Many incoming envelopes and boxes can be used again for outgoing mail.
Close the loop. Place a recycling bin next to your office waste basket and recycle all scrap paper. Every half-pound of office paper you recycle saves the equivalent of one pound of greenhouse gas emissions, plus the equivalent weight in trees.3 Also turn in your old toner and ink cartridges for recycling. Large office supply stores like Staples and OfficeMax accept cartridges. (My youngest son’s school raised funds, and awareness, through their cartridge recycling program. A lot better than selling candy!)
Green Office Supplies
Recycled paper. Always look for recycled paper products that are made from PCW (post-consumer waste) paper. Sometimes recycled paper products are actually composed mainly of wood chips and mill scraps. You can find 100 percent recycled paper products that are processed without chlorine by going to http://www.greenlinepaper.com This company also reuses shipping cartons and packs them with recyclable paper or biodegradable peanuts, rather than foam peanuts and plastics.
Envelopes. Look for envelopes made of PCW paper and processed without chlorine. ....read more
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