How green is your office?

The environmental card has been played many times in business over the years and each time it rears its head it is does so with more voracity and more staying power. This time round it looks as if the drive for sustainability in the workplace is here to stay and we must each take a view as to what we are willing to do to comply.

In the end the balance you need to strike is between being green and being commercially savvy. In previous attempts to persuade business that green is the way forward it has fallen down shortly thereafter when price and product quality come to the fore. Increased price and reduced quality is not the best way forward for any business.

But as with many areas of supply when the initial attempts are somewhat flawed a bit of perseverance can pay dividends in the long run. I am sure one or two of you in the past will have gone down the route of refilled printer cartridges that not only fail to print properly but you need to buy twice as many as the originals you used to buy, or you will have been swayed by early attempts to get you to move from BT to another telecom provider when all you had to do was dial in a prefix of six numbers!

Both of these attempts to assist you will have left you with slightly smouldering fingers and an increased mistrust of suppliers. However nowadays only 5 years later both reconditioned IT consumables and alternatives to BT are the norm and are as good as the original but usually far lower in price.

So can we safely say that green is the best way forward both morally and commercially for your business? Most probably not in all instances, some suppliers are claiming their green credentials just to make sure they are on the bandwagon but their claims can be tenuous to say the least – the utility companies to name just several!