A Guide to Green Office Design

Environmental sustainability is becoming an even more pressing issue in all areas of life, particularly in architecture and design. Most contemporary designers are looking to create products with as little environmental impact as possible, including products made from recycled materials and products that are highly energy efficient.

With the enthusiasm architects and engineers have for creating multiple solutions for critical problems, looking through the wide range of green products available for your office design can be a little overwhelming. Determining which green practices are the most effective, which will save you money rather than create additional costs and which you can work seamlessly into your current work practices can be a very difficult task, especially when you come to working a number of different sustainability practices into one strategy for your office design.

The office design is the best place to start when building a comprehensive environmentally friendly strategy for your business. Old office buildings with outdated office designs often consume a disproportionate amount of energy and addressing this issue can be the most significant step in making your workplace more sustainable. Here are some further basic tips on improving the green status of your office design.

• Reuse Materials

Recycled materials can be used to great effect throughout your office design. Many highly polished pieces of office furniture made from recycled metals, plastic and wood are available to suit the style of any office design. Reusing materials in your office design prevents old products going to waste in landfill and avoids damaging the environment further for the procurement of new materials.

• Reduce Waste

By developing a clever office design, one that specifically serves your company's needs, you are also on your way to developing a green workplace. Custom-made office design that conserve space where needed and place resources appropriately are significantly more environmentally friendly than office designs that take a “one size fits all” approach to workstations and layouts.

• Green Technology

The most obvious step to reducing a building's energy consumption is to turn off the lights and heating at the end of each day, but sometimes this is hard to enforce or not effective enough. As an alte ative, there are smart lighting and temperature control systems available which manage the electricity usage of an office design automatically. To additionally improve your green office design, choose appliances, such as heaters, light fittings and water heaters which conserve energy.