Darrin Johnson's Weblog: Need for speed...

The blog action day on the environment earlier this week got me thinking about my work office which is, as my mother would say, a "pigsty". The clutter is largely a result of giving higher priority to working (e.g. meeting with people, dealing with email, etc.) rather than taking the time to sort through the mess to clean it out. However I have taken a different look at my office by putting on my eco-responsibility hat and thinking in terms of the eco opportunity cost of not cleaning it. What outdated and unused documents sitting there could be recycled for a better use? What piece of equipment could be passed to somebody who could actually use it rather than it gathering dust and eventually being e-waste? These are some of the simple questions I asked myself.

Although it is a work in progress here is what I have done so far:

• Recycled an equivalent of two reams of paper
• Returned five or so VPN Token Cards to be refurbed/recycled
• Passed a set of Solaris Internals books to an engineer who could use it
• Gave an Intel Developer Forum backpack from a recent conference to a colleague whose son could use it
• Gave away a fiction book that I will never get around to reading
• Cleaned out partially filled boxes to recycle/reuse the boxes and distribute the equipment in the boxes to team members to use
• Took home eight or so lunch bags to reuse (Note: Starbuck's bags are great for this)
• ...

There is no need to calculate carbon offsets, watts per hour saved, etc. to see the obvious eco-benefit of taking the time to do something as simple as cleaning your office.