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How to Create an Eco-Friendly Office
If your office is due a renovation, or if you’d like to make some ‘green’ changes to your workplace, then this is the article for you. Arc Business Interiors are going to look at the ways you can redesign your office with eco-friendly furniture and features.
An eco-friendly office is a workspace that is designed to minimize its impact on the environment. This could include using sustainable materials, conserving energy and water, and promoting a green lifestyle among employees.
There are many benefits to creating an eco-friendly office. These include:
If you’re thinking of turning your office into an eco-friendly office, here are some of the main features you could look into:
There are some fantastic sustainable flooring options available, ranging from natural stone and sustainable wood to more left-field options – thanks to the creativity and innovation of interior designers, you can now have a beautiful carpet made out of recycled fishing nets! If you’d prefer a more traditional type of flooring, then you can still opt for an eco-friendly style; look for reclaimed wood and wood sourced from renewable forests if you’re after timber.
While the ceiling tiles of an office might be somewhat underappreciated, there’s still plenty of scope to get creative whilst remaining eco-friendly. On a more simple level, you can use paints with a low environmental impact; water-based paints with low volatile organic compounds (VOC). These compounds are harmful to the environment as they release chemicals into the air, even years after painting. Low VOC doesn’t mean low quality; you’ll still get the same high standard of colour and coat, but with a lesser impact on our environment.
Lighting should be a key focus of any efforts to be more sustainable or environmentally-friendly. There are so many ways you can be creative with lighting without compromising on the quality of your light. LED lighting has a very long lifespan compared to other lighting formats, and LED lights can be combined with smart technology to provide innovative, effective lighting solutions. If you install LED lighting into a suspended ceiling, you’re onto a winner; you get all the benefits of the lighting whilst making use of the brilliance of suspended ceilings.
Reclaimed furniture is abundant – you don’t need to have a network of contacts to kit out your office with incredible recycled furniture. This can mean a number of things: you could shop for second hand furniture online or in charity shops, or you could make use of eco-friendly materials to build your own furniture. The Data Shed in Leeds is a great example of the latter; they’ve utilised chipboard – which is composed of 70% recycled materials – for fantastic auditorium seating and wall partitions.
Away from major parts of the office like floors, ceilings and furniture, there are plenty of smaller but no less important touches you can make to help your workplace be a little bit greener. As part of our eco-friendly office design, you could consider:
Recycled paper products: there are so many opportunities to utilise recycled paper products in an office environment. From the paper used for notes and printouts to napkins and toilet paper, consider replacing everyday paper items with their recycled counterparts.
Biodegradable packaging: Another area with plenty of scope for eco-friendly changes, packing materials often slip under the radar when we’re looking for ways to cut back on our environmental impact. Recycled cardboard, environmentally-friendly packing tape and recycled labels are easy to procure.
Compostable bin bags: We throw so much waste in the bin every week, it makes sense to add compostable bin bags to our workplaces to help lighten the load we place on the environment.
Making the workplace more environmentally-friendly is something we should all be thinking about, and there are plenty of ways we can fit-out our offices in an eco-friendly way without compromising on our creative visions or the quality of our furniture and features.
Arc Business Interiors are trusted suppliers of first-class office fit-outs, including flooring, ceiling & lighting options, and furniture options for customers in Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. From small spaces to major corporations, there’s no project too big or too small – get in touch with us today to find out more.
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