How to form a green team at work

If you've ever looked around your office and thought, "we should be recycling that," you may not be the only one. Consider starting an office green team.

A green team is a group of employee volunteers who look for ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle in the office. They team up to bring their individual skills and passion into a collective for changing behavior among their peers.

Their efforts not only help the environment, but they can improve the company bottom line. Offices with green teams enjoy the benefits of lower electricity bills, less waste, and engaged employees who build project management, communications, and leadership skills as they plan out their eco-friendly campaigns. It's a win-win for everyone.

Post a notice on your company bulletin board, send an email to all staff members (or just the people you know in your department, if your office is strict about sending emails to the whole company).  Ask who is interested in environmental issues and is willing to bring that passion to work in forming a green team.

Provide an outline of topics to brainstorm such as:

• Improving energy conservation, from lights to computers.
• Boosting recycling (tip: start with paper!).
• Finding alternatives for food and drink containers in break rooms and cafeterias
• Organizing carpools and ride-sharing, encouraging public transportation use and biking.
• Lessening the company's overall environmental impact.

Set up a meeting. Ask what topics the group is interested in taking on. Designate a leader -- someone who will keep a list of the issues that come up in team meetings.

Once you've established a set list of projects to pursue, task your leader or another volunteer to find contacts within the company who can be your point-person for requests, such as the facilities manager who needs to sign-off for setting lights on timers or motion detectors and the purchasing agent who approves an order for recycling bins or biodegradable break room supplies.

Ask for project leaders to take on each task on your list and develop a campaign for change. You may also want to appoint a communications person who has skills to create marketing materials and draft proposals to present to senior executives to get them involved. These proposals should not only state why this change would benefit the environment but how it will reduce costs for the company. Most executives are willing to give attention to something that affects their budget.

Since the role of a green team is to increase employee awareness around the impact of personal actions -- such as putting something in the recycling bin versus the trash bin -- much of your team's job will be to make this kind of enlightenment interesting, informative, and fun rather than finger-pointing or nagging.

This can be done through campaigns that are creative and positive, showing how current habits impact the environment and how new habits can improve it. Perhaps pick a mascot to be your spokesperson such as a polar bear or other endangered species suffering from the effects of global warming.

Consider fun ways to bring education into the office and pique the interest of all employees. See about bringing in guest speakers or host a movie screening event ("An Inconvenient Truth" is a classic!)

Set a schedule for monthly green team meetings to brainstorm ideas, establish projects, and review the outcome of campaigns. Be sure to offer recognition to project leaders with a round of applause for their efforts.

Remember to be flexible. Employees are adding these new tasks to their existing workloads (out of the goodness of their heart), so it's important to be understanding if campaign deadlines need to be pushed back.

Put together a distribution email list of members and set up an intranet webpage to post agendas and project progress. An internal website is useful for green team members while inviting potential members and letting other employees review and take note of what's happening.

And be proud. When we look back in 10 years and someone asks, "Did you know about global warming back then? Did you do something about it?" You can say, "Yes we did!"