Our Green Adventure

For more than a year now, we at Alberta Venture have been planning to publish a themed "green issue" in August. But it was only as we began to plan and assign this issue a few weeks ago that our publisher, Ruth Kelly, made the deceptively obvious proposal that we actually green up our act (or at least attempt to do so) as a company for this special publication. And if those changes prove painless, especially beneficial to the environment, accretive to our bottom line or some combination of the three, we'd want to make them permanent.
Welcome, then, to our company blog as we muddle through the process of improving our environmental practices. As a first act, the AV editors got together and brainstormed a few ideas: adjusting the default settings on all our computers to double-sided printing, taking inventory of our garbage (we already recycle paper, but perhaps we could compost those coffee grounds), invite some experts in areas such as energy use and toxics to give us a green audit, to calculate the number of kilometres each of us drive to work each week and issue a "commuting challenge" to other company departments to see who could reduce their total the most.
Right off the bat it was obvious that to make a meaningful impact we would have to involve all the other departments of the company (advertising sales, circulation, design/production, marketing/events), especially as these in many cases have a greater environmental impact to begin with than we wordsmiths do. Secondly, we have to arm ourselves with more information as to what we're doing now and how we can improve it.
But we're off. Look for more posts in the weeks to come from Venturites as we actually turn talk into action.