Coworking: An Easy Way To Green Your Business

05.09.11

These days, almost everyone is looking for ways to be green, but just like Kermit said, it’s not always easy.

Whether you’re worried about the planet or not, there are significant benefits for those that live a more eco-friendly life, like saving money, wasting less, and presenting a more responsible image to earth-conscious clients.

By working for yourself, instead of a bloated company full of time and resource-wasting bureaucracy, you’re already pretty lean and mean. But coworking instead of working from home could help you reduce your impact even further. Here’s how:

Ditch The Commute (or at least reduce it)

Most coworking spaces are centrally located in downtown areas or business districts so that they’re convenient to the freelancers that live and play nearby. This means a cross-town commute in morning gridlock becomes a leisurely bike ride or walk. Most car trips occur only 2 miles from the driver’s point of origin. Unfortunately, short trips are up to three times more polluting per mile than long trips. When bicycling or walking is substituted for short auto trips, 3.6 pounds of pollutants per mile are not emitted into the atmosphere.

Consolidate Coffee Pots (and everything else)

Space owners often brag that while city governments bend over backwards to bring a single 200 person company into town, freelancers represent 200 single person companies, some of which grow up to be much bigger. The only problem is that 200 people working at home equals 200 coffee pots, lights, air conditioners, televisions, radios, and printers gobbling down costly energy all day long. When you join a coworking space, this energy consumption is drastically consolidated. Everyone shares a coffee pot, a printer, and only one room has to be heated or cooled instead of 30 entire houses. By coworking, you save money and the environment gets a little break.

Reducing, Reusing and Recycling Made Easy

If you haven’t figured it out by now, coworkers are a pretty creative bunch. Most coworking space owners don’t have lots of capital to throw around, so sustainability and conservation are built into the business plan. At Cohere, recycling is easy because there are handy bins throughout the space. We’ve even got a handy little composting bin in the kitchen ready to repurpose those coffee grounds and apple cores into garden fodder. We offer cloth napkins so you can avoid wasteful paper towels and make use of our amazing skylight to utilize passive solar lighting for 8 months out of the year.

Other coworking spaces take even more drastic steps to clean up their carbon footprint, like purchasing green energy, offering carpools or lender bikes, participating as a drop station for CSAs, and utilizing CFLs and LEDs.

In what other ways has coworking helped you save money, reduce waste or otherwise keep it green? Share your experiences in a comment!

Image Credit: Flickr – Aunt Owwee

Tags: carbon footprint, community, conservation, Coworking, energy, environment, green, recycling, sustainability

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2011 at 9:39 am and is filed under Advice/Tips, Benefits of Coworking, Community, Coworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.