(Staff in Avery’s Maidenhead office celebrating Green Office Week with a junk modelling challenge)
This month marked the fourth annual Green Office Week (14 – 18 May), run by Avery Office and Consumer Products. A nationwide awareness week, this year’s Green Office Week inspired and empowered office workers everywhere to think about the environment and change their working practices.
Bigger and better than ever before Green Office Week 2012 attracted high profile support and collaboration from a wide range of leading environmental organisations including the Carbon Trust, Forum for The Future, Global Action Plan, OxTreeGen, First Mile Recycling, Energenie and many more.
This year’s campaign saw a whole host of new features including an exciting online Green League with points and prizes awarded to workers for sharing their green activities and making real changes in the office, as well as taking part and encouraging participation in the Green Office Week daily themes. The league proved to be big hit with employees everywhere downloading Green Office Week’s helpful tips and tools, uploading pictures of their green efforts and opting to purchase environmentally friendly office products.
The Green League’s star prize of an upcycled trolley Chair designed by Dragon’s Den winner and junk modeller-extraordinaire Max McMurdo went to Dave Vickerstaff, Architect & Environmental Manager at Architects Design Group. His environmentally-friendly efforts impressed the Green Office Week team and won him the most points.
Other exciting new features for 2012 included a junk modelling competition to re-use office waste, designed to encourage and inspire long term change in the workplace. A unique ‘Green Working – Ask the Experts’ event was also held at the Business 2012 Show, where a panel of eco experts answered a variety of questions from show attendees on improving sustainability and environmental efforts in the workplace. The specialist green panel consisted of Junk Modeller Max McMurdo, the Carbon Trust’s Paul McKinney, Forum for the Future’s Principal Sustainability Advisor Ben Kellard and green journalist, consultant and author Amy Fetzer.
The week also revealed a ground breaking survey of UK workers that uncovered more than half would be happier and more positive at work if the companies they work for were more supportive of their efforts to be environmentally friendly.
Commenting on the success of Green Office Week 2012 Avery’s Marketing Director Gregg Corbett said: “Green Office Week 2012 has been a great success, proving more popular than ever and receiving an overwhelming amount of support and backing from offices up and down the country.
“This year we’ve seen real evidence of workers wholeheartedly engaging with the daily themes and actively trying to make a difference in their offices. The wide variety in the sizes and sectors of the organisations taking part this year has been wonderful to see too – it just goes to show that businesses really are starting to prioritise the environment and sustainable working.”
