5 Steps to Starting Your Own Office Composting Program

Starting a composting program at your office can be challenging, but if you follow these simple guidelines you can set yourself up for a successful program.

  1. Find a stainless steel bucket you can keep on your office’s kitchen countertop. Stainless steel is easy to clean and wont absorb color or odor from foods.
  2. Post signage up to let everyone know what can and can’t go inside the container.
  3. Arrange to have your container emptied on a daily basis into a large bintote and store it somewhere dark and dry. A Janitorial or storage closet works well as a storage space.
  4. Find out when your city recycling and composting pickups are scheduled – if you are in an office building check with your landlord as your garbage pickups could be from a private contractor. Find out the costs associated with arranging weekly pickups.
  5. Schedule your compost pickups at least once per week, keep your bins clean by using a biodegradable liner or requesting your bin gets exchanged for a clean one every week.

To maintain a successful composting program remind your fellow employees what a positive impact they are having on the environment and that by composting they are reducing their carbon footprint.

Have you tried composting in your office? How did it work?

Your 15mins of fame

Recognition is an essential element in our culture. Over the years Softchoice has developed a number of high-profile awards to encourage our people to set the bar high and reach for it every day. Open to all employees, the Softchoice President’s Club trip rewards the most outstanding individuals annually with an all-expense paid trip to an exotic location. While enjoying first-rate accommodations, fun activities and great food, President’s Club winners have plenty of time to interact with each other, as well as Softchoice’s President and senior leadership team. [Read more...]

Finding that right balance

Ensuring a healthy work/life balance among employees is an essential component of our success. To help reduce stress and promote overall health, we encourage our people to live an active lifestyle. We also have an employee gym on-site in our Toronto headquarters that is open for use seven days a week from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Softchoice offers complete benefit packages, including allowances for massage and alternative medicine, as well eye care and full dental coverage. With respect to sick time, we recognize that the personal circumstances vary from one employee to the next. For this reason we do not maintain a stringent policy.

When employees fall ill, they are encouraged to stay at home and take care of themselves. This policy helps stop the spread of illness within the office and often leads to swifter recovery times. Should employees be away for more than five consecutive business days, they may be entitled to receive Short Term Disability pay at 100% of their base pay for a period of 30 days. Our Long Term Disability program covers employees at 60 percent of what they earned the previous year.
To reduce stress and help our people balance their home and professional lives, we also offer an employee assistance program (EAP). This program provides lifestyle and stress management expertise, in addition to personal counseling.

Frozen energy cost make an greener data center

A data center in Phoenix has found a way to “freeze” their data center costs – using ice balls. The Ice  Ball Thermal Storage System may be the coolest technology to hit the market…literally!

The ice balls are water filled, dimpled plastic spheres a little bigger than a softball. The balls float in four huge tanks filled with a glycol solution that chills the balls by night and pumps the cool air into the data center by day. This shifts the energy consumption from day to night allowing the utility generators to run more efficiently.

You might wonder why anyone would have a data center in on of the hottest places in the US. There are benefits to the hot, dry desert climate. For example, it lends itself to energy evaporative cooling technology when the temperatures at night dip down low.

That’s not all. This company has found a way to beat the Phoenix heat in other ingenious ways – reducing their energy use and taking advantage of the innovation new ways to be green. Read more…http://features.techworld.com/data-centre/3244249/ice-balls-help-data-centre-go-green/

Buying Carbon Offsets

This project green initiative was to reduce or eliminate the impact of Softchoice’s logistics by purchasing carbon offsets. In case you are unfamiliar with what carbon offsets are, and how they work, the brief most direct definition is that carbon offsets are ways in which companies can have a positive impact on the environment to make up for  harm caused in its operation. The price of a carbon offset is generally based on the cost of an environmentally positive company reducing one ton of carbon in the atmosphere.  These offsets are issued by a third party who distributes the funds to companies working on green products or directly from the company. 

Initially the project was only to buy carbon offsets but later evolved to providing data direct to customers on the statistics and geographic route mapping of their purchase. Generally these were roughly twenty-six dollars per ton and could be bought by a variety of vendors. The second task in this purchase was to find out how many carbon credits were necessary.  After combing the internet for carbon calculators I was able to locate a company which had a calculator specific to shipping emissions. Using another calculator to determine the proper sample size needed to in order to draw conclusions about our total emissions I ran the sample through the calculator [Read more...]

Technical Difficulties

Softchoice in 2010 made some key changes to their IT environment and network. These changes caused problems with two of your green initiatives that were released in 2008 and 2009.

Due to the theses changes Softchoice had to make the decision to remove the Faronic Power save and Printelligence programs from the network. We are currently looking at other programs to replace these reporting tools that are better fit to your current IT environment. Softchoice is committed to having replacement program in place shortly as it is part of your Green IT solution and power conservation commitment.