What are the simple steps for making a 10 person professional office green?
We would like to be a carbon neutral office by October of next year but how do we get started? We operate a small business in the Northeast.
One of the easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to decrease your energy use. Some ways to do that include replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, turning off lights when leaving a room, and shutting computers down at night. For other ideas, see:
Several of these terms have been coined by Janine Benyus who has been studying biomimicry. Her book is called Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.
Amory & Hunter Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute have coined a number of these terms as well related to natural capitalism. Visit their web site at http://www.natcap.org/ or reference their books. The titles dealing with this topic are Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, The Natural Advantage Of Nations: Business Opportunities, Innovation And Governance In The 21st Century, and A Road Map for Natural Capitalism, an e-book available through Amazon.com.
You might also want to check out The Dictionary of Sustainable Management at http://www.sustainabilitydictionary.com/, a project of the Presidio School of Management.
If these sources don't help you determine definitions for some of the terms, try using Google's DEFINE search (search syntax is define:word or term). As a test, I used the search string define:"environmental labeling". Google didn't come up with a definition, but did ask if I wanted to search the web. The first result in the web search was to EPA's About Environmental Labeling page, which explains how they define it.
A search for define:biomimicry produced no definitions, but clicking on the "search" link provided a link to http://www.biomimicry.org/intro.html, which has a definition at the top of the page.
If you type the above terms into Google's search box (with or without define: at the beginning), you'll find that a page at or near the top of the results list will give you a generally accepted definition or explanation of the term.
