Greening our operations
Like many others, over the past year we’ve become seriously concerned about our impact on our environment and our role in climate change. (As an individual, I’m not an alarmist by nature, but I have to say I’ve been freaked out a few times about the impact us humans are having on our planet.)
As a company, earlier this year we started looking at ways we could become a more sustainable. It turns out that it wasn’t hard or expensive to take meaningful action. Here are a few things we’ve done so far.
We lease our office which means that we don’t have much control over the efficiency of the physical structure. This can be frustrating during the summer, when we could turn off the air conditioning by simply opening the windows and enjoying that cool Elliott Bay breeze that comes off the water.
The building owners did decide to take advantage of an expiring City of Seattle lighting retrofit credit last year to replace the fixture ballasts, which was one of the most effective things they could do. Not only did this reduce electricity consumption, it also improved the quality of the light. (We also are lucky to have some pretty decent natural light, which means that for a portion of the day we can even go without all of our overhead lighting.)
We also purchased a Prius, affectionately named “XBAR 1″, that we’re using for business related car travel. This, combined with the bus passes the company now offers to all employees (thanks to Urban Mobility Group’s FlexPass program), means that we’ve reduced our footprint in one of the most important areas — transportation.
And just last month we inventoried and offset our greenhouse gas emissions.
I never feel like we can do enough in this area, but I do think this is a decent start that we can continue to build upon over time. Plus, going through this process has raised our employees’ awareness of the real environmental issues we need to tackle and the actions we all can start taking today.
