The planet is said to have become a ‘global village’ and this is largely down to the ease with which we can now travel and communicate across the world. While this has revolutionized global business, the impact on the environment has been equally dramatic and so reducing your company’s carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions has become ever more urgent. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this.

Perhaps the most obvious is to save paper. It is estimated that a single tree is the equivalent of 12,000 sheets of paper. A large office is likely to use several trees worth of paper in any given year. Of course, printing hard copies of documents will always be necessary to a degree, but scanning and sharing documents as much as possible should be encouraged. There are also smaller, more micro-level ways to preserve paper. For example, encouraging staff to re-use ceramic mugs rather than disposable paper cups is a simple, yet effective measure.

Of course, reducing transportation as much as possible is also a sure-fire way to reduce the carbon footprint. Encouraging car pooling or even introducing a shuttle service to the office is a significant responsible step. Similarly, enabling staff to work from home or remotely will result in an even greater drop in carbon emissions. This is made much easier by the desktop virtualization systems available today. Market leaders such as Ericom allow multiple users to access all programs and documents on their desktop from multiple remote devices.

There are also numerous added environmental benefits to virtual desktop and BYOD systems. Incredibly, the energy required to power all of the world’s computers, data storage and communications networks is set to double by 2020. Offices and businesses will therefore be responsible for an increasingly large percentage of emissions over time. Virtual desktops mean that the number of servers, printers and other office-related devices can be reduced significantly and most systems, such as the Ericom software include universal printing capability.

Traditional energy-saving is also important in the office and technology exists to make it incredibly simple. Introducing systems which automatically turn lights off when a room is empty and installing software to automatically hibernate idle computers can make a big difference to carbon outputs.

Being environmentally conscious is increasingly important and luckily thanks to cutting edge technological solutions, reducing your company’s carbon footprint has never been easier.