A greener way to edit

Few topics are as hot these days as the environment. From choosing smarter energy sources, to developing more eco-friendly products, to partnering with environmental groups, businesses in every industry are doing their most to show the public how green they are.

While I’m wary of blogging about our own efforts simply to fit in to this trend, all companies do have a responsibility to let their customers know what they are doing to minimize their impact on the environment.

Every company can do something—a lot, in fact—even an editing company. And so I’ll talk in this post about what we’re doing to maintain a green workplace.

I’m proud, first of all, that we’ve come very close to running a paperless office. It helps that we focus exclusively on editing content for the web, as opposed to print, which allows us to conduct the entire process online, without ever touching a piece of paper.

The process typically looks like this: the client submits their content to us by email; we edit that content right on the computer, without printing it out; the content is delivered back to the client by email; and billing is conducted online, too. And because the content is destined for the web, it will usually reach our client’s audience without using up any paper at all.

One could argue that what we save in paper, we use up in electricity. Admittedly, electricity is our most intensively used resource. But even there we’re doing what we can; for example, working only on laptops, which are much more energy-efficient than desktop computers.

We also make sure to do all those little things that go a long way, such as taking advantage of the power-saving settings on computers, unplugging our electronic devices when they are not being used, and charging the devices at night when possible.

Perhaps most efficient of all, we run our company virtually. Not having to operate a physical office space means that we significantly reduce our consumption of energy, furniture, and all of the other resources it takes to run an office.

And we’re looking for more ways to reduce our footprint. On the horizon so far are plans to switch to a renewable source of electricity (such as the kind provided by Bullfrog Power) and to invest in ultra-low-power laptops (such as those with solid state drives).

As I say, I don’t want to talk about being green simply because it’s the trendy thing to do. Customers have a right to know, and so we’re making our practices clear.