Ivan Enviroman

Green Office, Green Coworking

Posted by Ivan Storck | Filed under Sustainability

Chris Messina has really lit a fire under my butt to get our shared “coworking” office CitizenSpace operating and certified as green. While Sustainable Marketing is already approved as a green business via the Co-Op America Green Business Network, it’s only recently that we’ve had a real office outside of my home. Now we can begin to participate in the Bay Area Green Business Program.
Some steps we’ve already taken:

1. Ordered a full set of trash, recycling, and compost bins from our trash provider.
2. Continuing our Renewable Energy Certificate program to offset our carbon emissions. See Sustainable Wesbsites Wind Power page for more details. We are going to extend this to the whole office in addition to Sustainable Websites.
3. Our partner Ethotec has prototyped a green business basics class.
4. Created a page on the Coworking Wiki to encourage other coworking spaces to be green. Feel free to add to it!
5. When we moved into CitizenSpace Tara and Chris chose sustainable bamboo flooring and low-energy compact fluorescent light-bulbs (CFLs)
6. Checked with our landlord on whether we had a low-flow toilet (we did!)
7. Applied to the San Francisco Green Business Program.

And what’s next:

1. Figuring out a strategy to deal with phantom power – all the various chargers (“do you have wall warts?!”) for our gadgets sucking up power even when they’re not charging.
2. Encouraging other technology businesses to go green and devising innovative programs to accomplish this.

Let me know in the comments what you’ve done in your office to make it greener, I would love to find out!

Technorati Tags: coworking, officegreening, green business, greenoffice, citizenspace

Tags: business, Sustainability

Permalink | Comments (5) | March 6, 2007

5 Responses to “Green Office, Green Coworking”

1. Green Coworking at Citizen Space « Coworking Community Blog Says:
   March 7th, 2007 at 12:16 am

   [...] reduce our footprint. I asked Ivan Storck, a Citizen Coworker who runs Sustainable Marketing, to write up what we’ve done so far and will be doing next: Chris Messina has really lit a fire under my butt to get our shared “coworking” office [...]

2. Britt Bravo Says:
   March 8th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

   This is great, Ivan!

   Since I know you all host events there too, here are some tips from “Green Mary” about greening events:
   http://www.netsquared.org/blog/britt-bravo/how-to-green-your-tech-conference

   She might be a good resource for questions that come up as would Chris Waters of the Nomad Cafe in Oakland who started a green cafe:
   http://www.worldchanging.com/local/sanfrancisco/archives/005917.html

   Keep up the great work!

   Britt

3. Citizen Space - » Baring it all: the costs of Citizen Space Says:
   March 20th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

   [...] We are also working on doing things like paying into carbon offsets and green certifying the space (Ivan talks about how we are doing this over here) [...]

4. Ivan Storck Says:
   March 20th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

   Another good resource I just found today is the Sierra Club’s 10 ways to green your office: http://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2007/03/10_ways_to_go_g.html I think we are doing pretty well on these – anyone know how to set up our printers to print double-sided? Also a local green office supply store is: http://thegreenoffice.com/

5. ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon » Some Green Stuff on Sunday Says:
   April 8th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

   [...] Citizen Space is Getting Greener [...]

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website