I have lately been trying to contact different companies that have press releases saying that they have green sustainability initiatives. Some like Hamilton Beach have press releases and have even talked to me to tell me they could not tell me anything else.
I have talked to one corporation’s sustainability leader who also could not tell me anything and whose company has not even divulged that they have a sustainability program so I cannot say who they are.
What is so private about what is going on? What is so hard about making some of their successes public? Is that there have not been any successes? Has it been that short term gains and inertia have kept initiatives stalled?
Or have the gains been so great they do not want to share with their peers?
It is hard to tell without hacking into their accounting systems. But I do not think it is that their gains have been so great or they would be crowing at the tops of their lungs. Investor relations organizations would love to show that to gain additional “green” investors.
Without great effort in the corporate culture, inertia wins. I know. I have been there. I have watched duplicated systems built because money was not allocated to merge the two, but money was bureaucratically allocated to create a new system before someone knew it was a duplicate.
I have seen so many people use paper cups for their coffee with ceramic mugs sitting on their desk. I have just started a new consulting gig and I am sitting at someone’s vacated desk. There were more than two drawers filled with old emails. Why would anyone print them all out?
When I was a child, my father always complained about lights left on and I have continued his tradition. I also turn off each empty meeting room’s lights as I walk by.
I save myself nothing by doing these things. I save a large corporation a few pennies. These are not pennies that they will notice since so much is wasted in the work environment.
So why do I do it?
I figure someone has to. I figure that if I do it, maybe just maybe there might be a million of me in other jobs doing the same thing. It only takes a few of us to keep the lights off on an office floor or wing. I can turn off lights and monitors every night. And maybe when that person comes in the next day and have to turn on their monitor, they may think that they turned it off, and that they should continue doing it.
How do you save energy even when it gains you nothing?
