If you used to have an office job, chances are you now work from home a lot. How are you sitting at home? You can also go for a sustainable home office. With these tips, you're sure to make it much cosier and more original. Discover why a sustainable home office is much more than a room with second-hand furniture and lots of plants.
Tips for a sustainable home office
A vintage desk, a refurbished computer screen, a recycled office chair and lots of plants that provide oxygen: these are all ideas for a sustainable home office. But a sustainable home office is more than a set of recycled furniture. In this article, I take you through some ideas. Most of the tips are also budget tips, so even if you have a small budget, you can make a great home office or study that is more sustainable. Exactly. Because a lot more is possible than you think.
Create a mood board before starting your sustainable workroom
Decorating a study is not the most difficult interior design project in the house. Although... Why is it that a lot of offices look rather uninspiring or messy? Anyone who has the occasional video call regularly sees a few things come up.... Anyway, for every interior design project you take on, make a mood board! You can start cutting and pasting in home decoration magazines yourself if you like, but Pinterest is at least as good and much easier. Especially as you plan to tackle that home office more sustainably, a mood board is nice. It allows you to make quicker choices among the second-hand offerings which are often quite varied (and therefore a good search).
If you create a mood board, you can find stuff that matches the colours and materials that match your mood board faster. My favourite places to find great second-hand furniture are Marketplace, the flea market and the thrift shop. Need help?
- Check out the list of Marketplace shopping tips. That's how to find the best stuff!
- Check out the list of tips for finding treasures at the flea market.
From mood board to sustainable home office with mostly second-hand and handmade items.
My sustainable home office
We started working on a sustainable workplace at home. What did we do? We opted for a desk running the length of the room. You can't buy something like this in a shop, let alone second-hand. We chose a simple handmade desk made of a wooden board fixed to the wall with brackets. All other furniture (such as desk chairs, a bench, the rug and other accessories) are second-hand from Marktplaats or the thrift store. There is also a large plant in the room. This is in a plant pot that was handmade from old car tyres, i.e. circular. The printer and monitor were bought from a refurbished shop.
Paperless working, saving energy and more ideas for your sustainable workplace
But a sustainable home office is much more than the interior. What do you take notes on? Do you switch off all devices when you leave things on? What do you eat for lunch? Besides furnishing the home office, there are many more things you can think of to make that sustainable home office a real success. What can you think of?
- Mailing, video calling, storing files in the cloud: for all that data use and storage, data centres have to work hard. And those data centres use a lot of energy and water. If you want to reduce that, it will help to do more video calls without images, to e-mail heavy files as zip files instead of attachments and to make cleaning up your cloud an annual chore. In this article, you will find tips for cleaning up your digital photo and video archive. You can also apply these tips to clearing your workbook in the cloud.
- What is your browsing behaviour? Do you already use the sustainable search engine Ecosia as default search engine? Five tips for more sustainable internet browsing can be found here.
- In winter, it can get pretty cold if you sit still at your computer for a long time. Do you then heat things up or put on an extra jumper? Are you a chilly person for whom an extra jumper is not enough? An infrared blanket for over your office chair is a tip. I have This one from Stoov.
- Besides gas to heat the room (and yourself), you probably also use quite a lot of electricity in a day. Turn off all appliances when you finish working. Don't leave your appliances on standby, as they will also consume power. A tip is to connect all your devices to a power strip with a switch. When you finish working, turn everything off with one button. You can read more tips on how to be smart about standby consumption and energy guzzlers here.
- A small but nice energy-saving tip for tea drinkers: put tea in a thermos flask. That way, you only need to turn on the kettle once and you can enjoy tea all day.
- Speaking of energy: if you work from home a lot, it's smart to check how sustainable your energy supplier is. Here too, unfortunately, you have shadowy practices: energy companies appear to be sustainable, but they are not really. They may have bought certificates allowing them to call themselves sustainable. Want to know how green your energy supplier is. Check out the green energy rankings!
- Zero waste notebooks from MOYU. These are not made of paper, but of stone paper. Stone paper is not only more durable to make than ordinary paper, they also have a special feature. You can wipe out notes with water and thus write on the booklet hundreds of times. Do you like this? Use the code 10GREENLIST to get 10% discount in MOYU's webshop.
- What do you do and eat in your lunch break? Choose a vegetarian or vegan lunch more often. Or save something from the supermarket.
- We just briefly mentioned plants in your sustainable workplace. Buy houseplants more sustainable and organic, for example at Sprinklr.
- In many offices, you also see flowers. But flowers have a big environmental impact. Often they have grown up in gas-fired greenhouses, sometimes they are flown in from warm countries and they often contain pesticides. If you like flowers in your workplace, choose them more sustainably. Some sustainable options are dried flowers, a subscription to artificial flowers from the flower library or flowers made of felt. Find out more about sustainable flowers in this article!
- Even remotely can you give a birthday or anniversary colleague a sustainable gift? Need inspiration? Then check out this list!
Your sustainable home office
It's not just with furnishings, it's how you use your (home) workplace on a daily basis that you can make a big difference. That's good news for anyone who is already completely comfortable and has no interior design needs. You too can create a sustainable workplace, even if that furniture was not your most sustainable choice.
More sustainable tips from thegreenlist.nl
- Also see: MOOD4GOOD, second-hand interior styling never got easier.
Also see: homemade granola is a tasty option for lunch on a homework day. - Also see: meal prepping on your home working day.
- Also see: How a translation agency is making sustainable strides!
Photo credits: main image: Angela de Vlaming, other: thegreenlist.nl.
