In honor of May and the greening of my New England world as spring settles into early summer, this month’s ADR Resources Roundup has a distinctly green theme…green as in environmental sustainability.
We mediators know a thing or two about neutrality. I’m hoping that means you’re interested in being carbon neutral too. While carbon neutral practices won’t address all of our environmental and sustainability challenges, committing to a green ADR practice adds to the efforts of other business owners who are making similar choices to tread more lightly on the earth.
Here are some of my favorite ways to live and work green, along with a few starting resources to guide you if you’re new to that practice. I hope you’ll leave a comment to share some of your own so we all benefit from each other’s good finds.
Counterbalance your travel emissions with carbon offsets. When you buy a TerraPass, for instance, your money funds renewable energy projects that help reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Other sites offering similar programs include CarbonFund.org and the Conservation Fund’s Go Zero. Carbon offsets don’t make up for carbon gluttony but they’re widely considered a viable part of any home or office environmental sustainability strategy.
Choose a webhost that cares about the environment. I was pleased when my host, DreamHost announced its decision to become carbon neutral with renewable energy credits. If your webhost isn’t, why not put on the pressure? I’m ignorant of the electricity usage of a typical large webhost, but here’s what DreamHost calculated: “When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something.”
Choose eco-friendly building and renovation materials. When I renovated my office, I used products like modular carpet tiles from Flor, which offers a unique “Return & Recycle” program once the carpeting is ready to be replaced, and low-VOC latex paint and sealants from BioShield. You can learn more about your options at Seventh Generation and TreeHugger.
Choose eco-friendly office supplies and cleaning products. When I originally set up shop, we lived in the Burlington, VT area, home of Seventh Generation, so it was a natural (ha!) choice to select their products for my office. Now green products are ubiquitous, though you should be careful to consider packaging and carbon miles when buying. For more resources, try The Green Office.
Get off the junkmail circuit. It’s estimated that more than 100 million trees’ worth of bulk mail arrive in American mailboxes each year, the equivalent of deforesting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. A program I’ve used to get junkmail drastically reduced is run by New American Dream.
Unplug your electronics when not in use. According to Conservation International, “phantom electricity,” the power drawn by cell phone chargers, stereos, and any other electronics with transformers—even when they’re off— emits about 12 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere a year in the U.S. alone.
Bannish the traditional light bulb. You’ve seen the data. And the next generation of energy-saving bulbs offers improvements over the old options. Check out these good tips and then find bulbs for your fixtures at Environmental Defense and Ban the Bulb.
Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.
Here’s one more resource…Save a Tree with Greenprint.
Future green building must take account of the “greenwashing” that seems to be accelerating throughout the real estate market place. I’ve seen repeated use of words like “green” and “stewardship” across the board. I’ve seen some realtors using the word “green” in their ads, knowing that awareness is elevating by the media and they use that hype to drive more traffic to their listings. I’ve run across great sites such as Listed Green that screen developers and realtors so as to minimize the “greenwashing” effect.
Some blogs have been overused in this regard as well. Hopefully, the general public can sift through this green hype and really see the changes that builders and developers have to do to reduce our carbon footprint.
Dave, I’m grateful for the Listed Green resource! We’ll probably be house hunting ourselves in the next 1-2 years and it’s terrific to know about this resource. Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment.