Many of us are working to green our home lives but it is important to bring that green initiative to the workplace as well. Offices generate tons and tons of waste everyday.

The often forgotten first step in any greening process is to reduce the amount of waste generated. Remember reduce, reuse, recycle? Recycling is the last step. Try this: gather up a few of your co-workers from different areas of your office and spend five minutes talking about paper usage habits. I gurantee that you’ll find dozens of ways to reduce paper use in those five glorious earth-saving minutes.

Quick n’ easy ideas to get the ball rolling are to save single-sided prints for note paper (you can even make little note pads using the paper cutter and stapler) and stop printing emails, you really don’t need to, I promise. In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded (PDF) in the United States. This is up from 29 percent in 2000. We’re actually discarding more paper than we did before the Web became available  to us civillians. Paper is a great place to start but this process can be applied to just about every office supply you use everyday.

Once you’ve considered how to reduce and resuse your office products more efficiently you can move on to the recycling part of the formula. Again, paper is a great place to start seeing a difference as more than 90 percent of the printing and writing paper made in the US is from virgin tree fiber. One fantastic resource I’ve found that makes it easy to switch to recycled office products is The Green Office, which Kelli mentioned in her great back to school article.

The website explicitly states the recycled content of any given product, even breaking down the post-consumer percentage. The Green Office also lets you know if a product is biodegradable, certified by a third party for some better-than-conventional aspect and if the product uses less chemicals than its conventional counterparts. The Green Office does sell conventionally produced products as a convenience to the consumer (so you don’t have to shop elsewhere) but offers green products wherever it can.

Be sure to place recycling bins in convenient spots all around the office (at the copier, the fax, in each cube, etc). Then, once you’ve used and reused those post-consumer recycled products find a recycler near you to pick up your recycling on a regular basis.

Once you get the ball rolling in your workplace and you make the boss realize the added PR value of going green you might mention that The Green Office also provides sustainability consulting and information about how your office can offset its carbon emissions.