Pilot Program Participants (check)

As mentioned in an earlier post, the Pilot Program for the Green Office will start on September and among the offices that have already committed to be part of this are: the Faculty of Engineering, the Student Success Centre, Hospitality Services, and Facilities Management.

It was very rewarding to receive positive feedback when we first approached the different departments. At the beginning we were feeling a little bit nervous as to how people were going to react to a Green Office Program, but most of the offices we approached had already started different initiatives in their own such as composting, recycling in each individual office, having plants and so on. We quickly realized that we have chosen the right offices and group of people to kick-off this program.

We hope that the level of enthusiasm expressed by the representatives spreads to all those that are participating in the program this fall. The GOP needs to be a commitment from all individuals in the office and not only a commitment from the green office Representatives. As with most green initiatives a broader commitment will provide the best results.

This program hopefully will act as a trend that will encourage all other office spaces to become part of this program in the next few years. Ideally participants will also take the habits learned from the program back home where entire families can learn how to be greener by becoming more conscious of the things that surround us.

Until the next time,

Environmental Program Coordinators

Dilemma!!

Quick question for all of you out there!!

Have you heard of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certified Paper? Well, for those of you who do not know what it means, FSC is an international certification and labeling system dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world's forests. FSC certified paper, currently used by Graphic Services at Western in all three print shops, is paper that has been milled in Canada and verified, guaranteeing that the paper products come from healthy forests and strong communities http://www.fsccanada.org.

On the other hand we also have the existence of post-consumer recycled paper. This type of paper contains a certain percentage of recycled fibres that can range from as little as 10% to 100% of recycled material.

Now, the question is, which type of paper do you think is more sustainable and environmentally-friendly??

Any comments on this?

... it's coming together!

Facilities Management’s Green Office Program (GOP), currently being developed at Western, was inspired by a similar program at Harvard. The main objective of the GOP is to involve staff and faculty into rethinking their actions at work and make them become more aware of some greener alternatives. But most importantly, I believe that this program is meant to empower our customers and convince them that every little action can be beneficial when helping the environment.

Currently our team of environmental project coordinators is working on the first draft of the GOP, which is taking shape. We got caught up a little bit with little details that arose on the way. Decisions such as: making it a point system or just by categories? Have a one fixed date to start or allow offices to join any time they want? But I guess the biggest question we had to start with was how to define an office.

The Pilot Program will start in September and we already have a few keen offices on board who want to help us answer some of those decision points. This pilot program will help us identify possible gaps in the first draft. We’ve checked in with other institutions that have implemented a green office program and decided that no two institutions are alike. We can learn from the road blocks they encountered during implementation, but we think most of our quality feedback will come from our campus community during the pilot.

There are hundreds of project completed or nearly completed in the Facilities Management Division, few of them reach out to our customers the way this project will. We’ll get there one person at a time!