Living an environmentally conscious lifestyle benefits you and the world you live in. Making changes to your work and home life will have a positive impact on the environment. If you have been thinking about ways to reduce your carbon footprint but aren’t sure where to begin, then take a look at our tips for creating an energy-efficient home office. We know that helping the environment is important to a lot of people, which is why we have put together this list of ideas for eco-friendly architecture and interior design.
Green Architecture
From sustainable architecture to an eco-friendly 30-story-high office tower in San Francisco, more and more architects are finding ways of making eco-friendly architecture beautiful by incorporating solar panels into their designs. The aforementioned office tower in San Francisco is occupied by the cloud computing company Salesforce, and includes a 50-foot high transparent lobby, so called the “urban living room.” The office building’s best feature is the fact it uses passive solar design and green technology, meaning a smaller carbon footprint.
Save energy with cloud computing
When thinking about the interior design of your office, make sure you choose energy saving technology for computers and laptops, like cloud computing. After all, making an environmentally-friendly office is not only about design, it’s about function too. Cloud computing essentially means saving data on a cloud server rather than a dedicated server. Nowadays, dynamic cloud servers are widely available and easy to set up, particularly from web hosting companies such as 1&1. By saving your personal documents, videos, emails and pictures on a remote cloud server you will save energy, benefiting the environment and cutting costs on your energy bill. As stated in Scientific American: “In a case study using the CLEER simulation, researchers found that if all American businesses moved their email programs, spreadsheet applications, customer management software and the like to centralized off-site servers, companies would shrink their computing energy footprints by 87 percent.”
Mother Nature
Let nature run wild in your office, with green walls, green rooftops, and plants. Many architects are making cities greener by designing buildings with ‘green walls.’ A ‘green wall’, also known as ‘living walls’ or ‘vertical gardens’ is a wall covered with plants that have their own soil and watering system. Grown inside or outside, green walls are visually striking and will create a unique eco-friendly style to your office. You could even make a kitchen garden in your office, growing vegetables, herbs and fruits available for use by the whole company, making your employees happy and encourage sustainable lifestyles.
