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Celebrate Earth Day With These Green Changes To Your Facility

Happy Earth Day! On April 22nd, we at MaintenX want to celebrate all the advances in the facility maintenance industry that are helping us change the planet, one day at a time.

Environmental sustainability is important to us, which is why we are always looking for the next advancement to help our clients reduce their carbon footprint. From energy-efficient appliances to simple office transformations, we believe that every step counts toward our goal of a sustainable future. Even the addition of a recycling bin in the office shows that your facility cares about the future of your community and the world.

Below are five different ways you can celebrate Earth Day in your facility with eco-friendly change:

Start a recycling program

If your city offers a recycling service, now is the time to sign up. There are more and more options for modern recycling, and commercial facilities are a great place to collect. You can recycle office papers, plastic, and aluminum bottles, and old office supplies to help reduce your building’s overall waste.

No new paper

Many offices are making the switch to paperless, but in some industries, this isn’t the best option. If you can’t eliminate paper use in the office, switch to recycled paper for your printing needs. This will reduce your environmental impact in areas where you can’t go fully digital and complete your recycling initiative.

Switch to energy-efficient appliances

There are so many options to reduce your environmental footprint with energy-efficient electronics and appliances. Everything, from lightbulbs to HVAC systems, comes in energy-efficient varieties. This will not only provide benefits to the planet but can also help you reduce your energy bill.

Choose sustainable eating options

Choosing eco-friendly snacks and catering options can inspire your employees to think about their food choices. By offering fair trade coffee or organic pastries at the morning meeting, you can make a small difference in your company culture surrounding environmental sustainability. This is also an easy way to bring awareness to Earth Day in a fun and engaging way for employees.

Incorporate sustainable landscaping

Many commercial facilities only choose landscaping designs based on aesthetic appeal and maintenance requirements. However, by adding some pollinating flowers or endemic species to your landscaping, you can add value to the local ecosystem. Butterflies, bees, and other native species will appreciate the effort, as well as visitors at your facility. You can even add some office plants inside to improve indoor air quality and boost office morale.

Earth Day is a yearly reminder that the world outside the four walls of work is just as important as what we do inside. To learn more about environmentally-friendly office practices, click here to read from the blog.

Defining Sustainable Business in 2021

In today’s world, more and more businesses are putting an emphasis on being environmentally friendly, or “green.” This is a major paradigm shift from the early days of big business, where profits and efficiency were the first and only concern. Here in 2021, being environmentally friendly is almost a necessity for a business to be truly successful, and sustainability is a goal for even smaller businesses. How is sustainability measured in practice, and what can the world expect from businesses as the year goes on?

What exactly is sustainability?

Sustainability involves how a business uses energy and resources, from paper to water. In order for a facility to be truly sustainable, it must generate at least as much energy as it consumes. While this is a lofty goal, the pursuit of sustainability leads many facilities to approach perfection and minimize the amount of energy that they consume. Because energy consumption is heavily tied to pollution, sustainability is considered a major step towards a company being truly green.

What are the trends for the rest of 2021?

Many large companies have striven to create sustainable facilities over the past few years, and this is expected to continue in 2021. The primary avenue for companies to achieve this is to limit the amount of energy they consume by either installing products that are engineered to use less electricity or equipment that generates electricity, such as solar panels. Depending on your facility’s location, either of these are excellent routes to pursue and would be a big boon to the environment.

Whether you decide to install green equipment or generate energy of your own, we at MaintenX can assist. We’ve helped many facilities across the country in their pursuit of sustainability and can offer both advice and expert services to help install new equipment, modify existing ones, and maintain both for a long time to come. To learn more about our facility maintenance services, please call us any time at (855) 751-0075.

Will We Meet These Sustainability Goals By 2030?

Sustainability is an important goal that both companies and individuals have been working toward for a long time. Businesses in particular have a higher responsibility to become more sustainable and thankfully it seems to be a trend that more and more businesses are implementing changes in pursuit of this goal. In the interest of setting tangible, clearly defined goals, the United Nations set up the Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform to lay the roadmap for sustainability in the upcoming years and the result is powerful.

What are the 2030 sustainability goals?

The UN’s framework for sustainability laid out seventeen goals for all businesses to work for, with the expectation being that they should all be able to meet them within a decade. The list of goals is as follows:

To end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
To end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
To ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
To ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
To achieve gender equality and empower women and girls.
To ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
To ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.
To promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.
To build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
To reduce inequality within and among countries.
To make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
To ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
To take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
To conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development.
To protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
To promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.
To strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

Will we reach these goals?

While these goals may seem lofty, they are completely attainable if we all do our part. If you are a business owner or facility manager, you have a social responsibility to work towards these goals as well, and you don’t have to do them alone. We at MaintenX are here to lend our support through our facility maintenance services and equal dedication to being as sustainable as possible. To learn more about our services and initiatives, please call us at (855) 751-0075.

Tips for Integrating Sustainability into the Workplace

Many facilities roll out sustainability programs expecting that everyone will follow them. Unfortunately, there’s more to a successful sustainability program than putting up signs and flooding inboxes with sustainability program rules.

To make sure your sustainability initiative goes off without a hitch, follow these tips.

Have Clear Goals

Be upfront and transparent with your employees by making it clear why sustainability helps them and the company. Creating simple, easy-to-follow guidelines can help motivate workers to join in the effort.

Reward Success

Positive reinforcement is a much better method than shaming your workforce into complying with your initiative. When we feel good about doing something—that we feel we’re not being forced to do—we’re much more likely to keep doing it in the future.

You can recognize the employees who shine in many ways. Company-wide contests are a great way to get employees onboard. For example, the person in the company that collected the most plastic containers to be recycled wins an extra day or week vacation. Make it fun, and people will be much more likely to get onboard.

Patience

Don’t give up or lose hope if you don’t see noticeable changes right away. Humans are creatures of habit, and it can take time to break habits.

Make sure to include employees in the conversation through planning, implementation, and rollout, along with alterations the policy might need down the road. When workers feel like part of the conversation, they’re much more likely to conform to the rules.

What is Water Autonomy?

Today’s green-savvy customers look for companies who take steps to be more climate-friendly. Taking such steps doesn’t just improve your brand’s public image, it can also become a positive part of companies’ internal culture while cutting costs.

By doing more with less, facilities that use greener alternatives to everything from their lighting to their energy sources create a healthier and happier environment for workers.

Below are a few methods to lower your facility’s environmental impact while saving you money.

Composting

Facilities today have the ability to reuse, recycle, or compost almost all solid waste they generate. Despite this fact, much of the food we throw out ends up in landfills. Composting programs encourage workers to put food waste into compost bins located throughout their facility. Composting can help your facility save money, increase employee happiness, and send a positive message to customers.

Sustainability

Many of today’s facilities have equipped themselves with smart technology. Smart technology allows facility managers to augment individual rooms’ temperatures and lighting individually. Other smart tech like digital restroom dispensers can provide real-time information about dispenser refill levels while informing cleaning staff of when and where they should service or refill them.

Taking small steps like these can help your company get a little greener without breaking the bank. By educating your staff about the importance of waste reduction while striving to lower your facility’s environmental impact, you can help create a more sustainable and brighter future.

3 Ways to Lower Your Office Supply Budget

One of the simplest methods to pare back you office budget is to decrease office supply costs. Office supplies can add up quickly. That random $25 purchase can really add up over time. –Luckily, there are many ways to cut back on expenses without losing the tools you need to do business. Below are three things you can do to cut down on your office supply budget:

Recycled Paper

Buying recycled paper is an easy and painless way to be greener while saving money on office supplies. Recycled paper is easy to find and comes in every size and use you could possible require.

Also, don’t throw away that used paper. Reuse pages that only have something printed on one side. Printing double-sided documents, though, is another great way to cut down on waste awhile saving money in the process.

Buy in Bulk

It’s a good idea to buy bulk wholesale office supplies whenever you have the chance. There are thousands of online and offline paper product sellers that can substantially mark down the price if you buy in bulk from them. Buy all the ink cartridges, lead pencils, paper, pens, dry erase markers, note pads, sticky notes, and clipboards you want that are on clearance. If you think you can’t afford to purchase in bulk, do some homework. There are a lot of sources and you can find great prices and liquidation sales if you’re savvy enough. It’s worth the effort and can save you thousands of dollars in office supply costs.

Bank of the West’s Renewable Energy Exhibitions

BNP Paribas has promised that it will invest $15 billion in renewable energy by the year 2020. BNP Paribas, parent company to Bank of the West, is celebrating its commitment to investing in Renewable Energy in a spectacular and unusual way by hosting a yearly renewable energy exhibition. The exhibition, which first launched in central London in January 2018, has a lot of features to look out for, including ICX’s ingenious new heating pump system.

ICAX uses a heat pump to reprocess the heat it creates back into the building in winter month without burning fossil fuels.

Also featured at the event is the Owen Square Community Energy Scheme which exhibits the decarbonization of heating in system which nixes the necessity for insulated ductwork.

The ICAX Energy Center:

moves electricity use from peak and off-peak energy hours to maximize efficiency while lowering costs
transfers heat into buildings in winter without using combustion and without emitting greenhouse gases
works in traditional spaces and with existing infrastructure already in place in most facilities

The BNP Paribas Group has said that it will no longer do business with any companies whose principal business activity is the exploration, production, or trading of oil or gas.

The BNP Paribus Group also promised that it will no longer finance any oil or gas exploration or projects in the Arctic.

Want to know more about renewable energy and how companies are using them to change the world? Contact MaintenX today!

How to Add Composting to Your Facility

Recycling things like cardboard, plastic, glass and even light bulbs comes second nature to a lot of facility managers. But what about food waste? Your facility is a great source of organic material. From meal scraps to lawn trimmings, there’s a lot you’re wasting if your facility isn’t composting.

Here are some tips to help you integrate composting into your facility waste management regimen:

Assess Your Facility

You need to decide if your facility is a good candidate for composting. Think about:

the amount and type of organic waste that’s generated
the space you have or don’t have for on-site composting
the amount of effort your facility can practicably commit to maintaining your on-site compost system
the amount of money it will cost
the amount of money you’re willing to dedicate to implementing a composting system

Get Started

Your composting program’s considerations should be defined by the specific number of employees and the amount of waste they create on a regular basis.

Vermicomposting

If you don’t have room or access to an outdoor area where you can construct a compost bin, consider vermicomposting indoors. Vermicomposting involves using worms to take care of the composting for you, in an indoor area. Worms are more than happy to eat your food scraps. And breathable compost bins can be placed beneath a break room sink or even in a utility closet. It may sound strange if you’ve never heard of the concept, but vermicomposting produces high-quality compost and is virtually effortless to maintain.

Does Your Facility Have Enough Recycling Bins?

Recycling has changed through the last decade from a good idea for a company’s image to, oftentimes and in many places, a legal obligation. Facilities now, in addition to paper, cardboard and aluminum, routinely collect and recycle electronic waste, fluorescent lamps, and batteries.

But are you doing it in the most effective way? Let’s explore some problems and solutions to recycling woes.

Location, Location, Location!

In an office, the best place to start recycling is right at the desk. Encourage people to sort paper into appropriate bins, which then can be emptied regularly. Workers can place inkjet cartridges in envelopes provided to every office and drop them in the mail. The processor of the cartridges then refunds a check to the organization.

Managers should locate recycling containers as close as possible to the source of the product to be recycled. If the location is right, it is much easier to sell recycling than if containers are located at a distant location. Do not expect people to walk long distances to recycle. If you do, then expect disappointment, as they are likely to drop the item to be recycled into the nearest trash container.

Measure and Share Your Results

Even if you’ve had a waste management strategy implemented for a while, it’s important to relaunch and remind people where the bins are and what can be recycled. Then ensure you maintain communication through monthly meetings or reports to keep a waste strategy top priority.

Want to know more about recycling? Call MaintenX today!

Category: Reduce Reuse Recycle