Green Business

Our company is in the process of becoming certified as a Green Business. The process is enlightening. While filling out the application, we must rate a variety of practices and how we are reducing pollution, increasing recycling, and reducing usage of things like paper and printer ink. We are also using less electricity in our lighting of the office.

The very process has allowed us to institute change with a minimum of discomfort. The most uncomfortable part of the changes are the changes to our attitudes. We are moving from being consumers of unlimited resources, to thoughtful consumers of limited resources whose desire is to lighten our footprint on the earth. That most difficult change is also the most exciting. Our agents seem to be "one-upping" each other in their ideas and practices on conserving and recycling. We installed a meter on our copy machines, measuring both print jobs sent from agents' computers as well as walk-up copy jobs. We intend to look closely at our usage of "ink to paper" usage and compare it to our efforts to create a paperless office. We now store our closed files on CD and on our server and provide our clients CD copies of their transaction file. We also send CD's to our counterparts in the the transaction - the other agent. We were concerned that our recycling efforts on paper were not really being recycled once they left our office, so we hired a shredding company to take all our documents that must be shredded for safety and our recycling paper stuff and shred it and turn it into recycled paper. We also buy recycled products, including paper and copy machine cartridges. We set our thermostats at 61 degrees before heat comes on and 78 degrees before air conditioning comes on. We are doing our best and doing it with a new attitude. We have new ideas about offering sellers an "energy audit" prior to listing their home so we can brag and puff about how energy efficient their home is in our marketing. What else, what else? We like feeling like we are trainable, changeable, and doing something that matters.