I’m headed out the door for a short weekend respite at the South Jersey shore, so I’ll make this week’s green links list short:

• I found this great viral video a while back from an alternative energy company. Can you guess who the star character is before the end?
• Cut your insurance rates by driving less! New “green” auto insurance!
• Think 1,000 square feet and $100K is too much. Try a Tiny House out for size.
• We need more green DIY links here. How about starting with this simple way to keep those plants growing with a minimum amount of effort?
• One of my hobbies is (or was) audio equipment. Check out these sustainable speakers made of what else? - Bamboo. Nic will also enjoy the url and logo of this site.
• I know we’re supposed to specialize in modern and affordable, but sometimes I really like to look at expensive toys for the home. Appliance manufacturers - Hire better industrial designers, pay them well and listen to them when they suggest offering more colors than SS, black and white. Please! For the love of Pete!

That’s it for this week. I’m outta here!

It has been an exciting week at Postgreen with meetings at city hall, new projects beginning, imminent land settlement and new electronic toys. We have a bunch of exciting stuff in the works so be sure to stay tuned. While you wait for us to amaze youwith our next wave of happenings look at this cool stuff I found on the internets . . .

• I know that everyone already knows about it, but as an avid walker I was pretty excited about reading this bit of news on Google’s walking directions. Check out my walk to work . . .

• As I have mentioned before, I usually avoid politics in this blog, but speaking about our current president seems to have left the realm of politics and entered the surreal. For example, note the comment he made at the recent G8 conference.
• It turns out that the individual smells that make up “new car smell” might not be particularly good for you. I now regret asking my fiancee to splash on the scent before every date. I just love a woman that smells like bromine, chlorine and heavy metals.
• Amazon is selling garbage, but it is pretty garbage.
• I want prescient ants to exist as much as the next person, but one wonders if a certain Turkish gentleman simply needs to get out more.

Want to see more about what Nic is doing on a day-to-day basis? Follow him on Twitter. You can follow Chad as well. What a social media saavy team we are.

I pledge to turn off my lights whenever I leave my office for extended periods (15 minutes or longer) and ask my employees to do the same.

This one doesn’t seem to need much in the way of exposition. I mean, generally it is common sense, right? I know as a kid this was a constantly repeated mantra. “When you leave a room,” my parents would say, “turn off the light.” There was nothing green about this. It was simply economics and basic logic. After all, my mother was probably right when she said that my stuffed monkey wasn’t scared of the dark.

Chad’s Green Office Tips

Turning off the lights is pretty straight forward. There are advancements in this pledge that include occupancy sensors on lights. Most of them basically have a sensor near the door that senses when you enter the room and when you leave. If you forget to turn off the light when leaving, it will automatically do so for you after a set period of time. This may be worth looking into during your green office renovations.

I’ll add one more tip to this post to go along with the lights. Ceiling fans and all types of fans for that matter should be turned off when leaving a room for a prolonged period of time as they only serve a cooling function when they are blowing directly on people in the room.

This post is part of our ongoing, 30 part series breaking down the Green Office Pledge. Sign up for the pledge and be sure to check out the rest of the series for more tips and anectdotes.

It’s only my second links post and I missed my Friday deadline by three days. Well here it is in abbreviated form:

• Video of Wind Turbine Exploding. Very Cool!
• MoMA opens Prefab exhibit in NYC. Go see it if you can. K&T from Philly have a home there also made out of Saran Wrap.
• Spotlight on Philadelphia modern architecture firm - Qb3
• Guide to recycling those hard to recycle items like packing peanuts.
• Gore challenges the US to become energy independent by 2018.

I am away on vacation if by vacation we mean trying to work in an unknown town with limited internet resources and sporadic phone service. Yes, I know. Vacation and work are not meant to be intertwined, but alas, the startup life is one that intertwines work with virtually everything. Fortunately, this “work”, justifies my constant access to the bounties of the information super highway and allows me to present a sampling of its wonders to you, our faithful readers. Look at this cool stuff I found . . .

• The first one was built to deter invading hordes of barbarians, but the new great wall in China seems to be encouraging them to enter. Huge, shiny and environmentally conscious. What barbarian could resist. Unfortunately, it could just be a sparkly piece of bait to lure us into their poisoned air.
• Okay, he calls gas “petrol” and gas stations “garages” but I’ll forgive him for being some kind of crazy foreigner. If I don’t, he might turn his amazing powers of prescience on me. Imagine a picture of yours truly in 20 to 30 years. If that wouldn’t drive my fiancee away, I don’t know what would.
• Call me stuck in the 18th century, but bloomers are a wonderful undergarment, rife with mystery and comfortable to boot. Anyway, it is nice to see them used to illustrate something other than puritanical backwardness for once.
• Chad actually found this link and shared it with me in Google Reader, so I struggled with whether or not I should use it. After all, he has his own links quota to fill now. Then I remembered that the link was about beer and I thought to myself “I like beer. I like talking about beer. Who is this Chad character to try to stand between me and talking about beer. I’ll show him . . . etc.” Anyway, here’s the link. Sorry Chad.
• I’ll admit that I’m linking to this because the article uses the word ecosexual, but really, it is a great example of the way in which the word green is being exploited to market virtually everything without requiring much in the way of green performance from the product, service or social event. First it’s green speed dating and next thing you know I’m headed out for green snow mobiling with my pals from the green bowling team in our green SUVs.

I pledge to regulate the thermostat to minimize energy use during unoccupied periods.

I’ll be honest. I don’t even know where the thermostat is in the office. I know . . . I’m a terrible green office advocate (but a great rock-paper-scissors player).

Even if I did know where the thermostat was it is unlikely I would need to adjust it often. Our office is also Chad’s home and, as such, is occupied pretty much all the time. The temperature is also kept at such a level as to provide the minimum necessities of comfort.

Now, some of you may be fortunate (or foolish) enough to have an office space separate from your home. This space is probably empty 50% of the time unless you are a severe workaholic in which case . . . seek help. For you non-workaholics (or at least less severe) this means you might be heating or cooling a bunch of stuff that doesn’t care how hot or cold it is like desks and chairs. Some quick adjustments to the thermostat on the way out could go a long way toward saving energy and a few bucks on the bills.

Chad’s Green Office Tips

Regulating the thermostat in your home or office is one of the easiest and most cost effective methods to reduce energy use. . The basic idea is to set the thermostat to a comfortable temperature only when people are occupying the office and then to change the setting when the office is empty to a temperature that will be easier to maintain.

This can be done manually or automatically with a programmable thermostat and can save up to $200 a year on your energy and cooling bills. It is relatively easy to assign someone, say your green office advocate, to adjust the temperature on the thermostat in the mornings and then again in the evenings when everyone is leaving work. An even easier way to make sure that the thermostat is being adjusted to the exact temperature desired at the right time every day is to buy a programmable thermostat.

A programmable thermostat can run as little as $30 so the payback is well under one year from energy savings. You can purchase models that will have one setting for the weekdays and another for the weekend (5+2), 2 different settings for each weekend day (5+1+1) or an individual setting for each day of the week (7-day). A 5+2 day model should be sufficient for most offices.

Currently I monitor and manually adjust our thermostat in our home/office based on the time of day, outside weather conditions and visitors we have in order to maximize efficiency. For most others that are not as crazy as I, a programmable thermostat is the way to go.

For more detailed info on this topic including recommended setpoints and times as well as purchasing guides, visit the energy star website brought to us by our lovely federal government.

This post is part of our ongoing, 30 part series breaking down the Green Office Pledge. Sign up for the pledge and be sure to check out the rest of the series for more tips and anectdotes.

Back in September of 2007 I wrote a post on the Origins of Postgreen and never followed it up with a final post on the subject. Well, now that Nic has gotten me back into blogging here at Postgreen, I guess I should finish this up.

Last time I left off with me finishing college and searching for my first job in the real world (not the TV show). I looked at two basic types of companies while searching for a job:

1. Large companies with good salaries, benefits, training and perks where I would most likely sit in a tiny cubicle and do the same thing day in and day out while attending school at night to obtain my MBA which the company would pay for.
2. Small to mid-sized companies that were growing but seemed to have no idea what they were doing. These companies came with less impressive salaries and benefits, but I would get a lot more responsibility and opportunity to try my hand at different positions.

It should come as no surprise that I chose the second path since most of my major decisions take the opposite route of what the average and probably smarter person would do in my same situation. My first job was as a Manufacturing Engineer at a $100M barcode scanner manufacturer in South Jersey.

While I was at this job, I was faced with to opportunity to pursue an MBA at night. I went back and forth with this decision for a while and ultimately decided that if I was going to start my own business, real world experience would be much more valuable than an MBA. MBA’s seemed to be better suited for those seeking a career in corporate America that need to be well versed in the latest jargon and buzz words.

So, after this decision was made I decided to take part in an experimental job rotation program at the company that would allow me to gain experience in a variety of departments to make me a well-rounded and more valuable employee. I was the first and last person to try this program. It took me to such departments as purchasing, scheduling, project management and eventually product marketing. While I was in this job rotation program, the company still did not spend squat on training so I had my boss buy me as many books as possible and always went to at least one major training of my own choosing each year. While they didn’t have a specific budget for this, they seemed excited that I wanted to learn on my own and found a way to pay for this training. I made sure that every book I bought and every training I went to could also benefit me when I ultimately decided to start my own company.

I worked at this company for about seven years up until I quit to start Postgreen in the fall of 2007. More on that next time…

This is a new weekly series (Look at That) that Nic told me I have to do. Every Friday I’ll post some of the best and more interesting green links I’ve found in the past week. So sit back, grab a pint and kick off your weekend with a few green links:

1. I got really excited about this fantastic method of controlling and monitoring home energy usage with an iPhone. Then I realized it is just a concept. Still worth checking out though.
2. We’ve been looking at different solar thermal setups at the 100K House blog over the past few months. Here is a great article on someone who designed and installed their own solar thermal setup for only $3,000 and are already saving up to $100 a month. Not bad.
3. Want to have your home rebuilt to LEED Silver standards after a fire? Check out the latest in insurance - Green Insurance.
4. I can’t think of any company that could build prefab homes better than my favorite auto manufacturer. Kaizen!
5. Lastly, we are looking at Frigidaire appliances over at the 100K project and I stumbled across this Frigidaire model that includes a built-in kegerator and tap on the front where a water dispenser would usually be found. I hope they have an Energy Star version!

One of the reasons we started a blog hear at Postgreen was to talk about starting and growing a small business with more than just financial profit in mind. Since starting Postgreen, I have become more familiar with the term “Triple Bottom Line” which embodies the core values we had in mind when starting the company.

Triple Bottom Line Definition (”TBL”, “3BL” or “People, Planet, Profit”)

Wikipedia defines Triple Bottom Line something like this: Triple bottom line accounting expands the traditional reporting framework to take into account environmental and social performance in addition to financial performance.
The concept of TBL demands that a company’s responsibility be to ’stakeholders’ rather than shareholders. In this case, ’stakeholders’ refers to anyone who is influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of the firm. According to the stakeholder theory, the business entity should be used as a vehicle for coordinating stakeholder interests, instead of maximising shareholder (owner) profit.

The three bottom lines are “Social, Economic and Environmental” or “People, Planet, Profit.” I prefer the latter or the 3P’s.

My first real exposure to the TBL concpet was at last year’s Social Venture Institute. I had heard a lot of the stats and concepts mentioned at this event before, but never at once under one term like Triple Bottom Line. I think what struck me most was how so many small business were adopting this way of operating into their businesses with the goal of continually improving on each of the three L’s each year. For anyone who knows we well, they will know that I am pretty big on this ‘continual improvement’ idea.

Anyways, long story short, we are creating a new category - Triple Bottom Line - on our blog to post about the concept of TBL and what we are doing at Postgreen to continually improve our positive impact to People, Planet and Profit. Hopefully other will get something out of our lessons learned in this arena.

Promise 2: I pledge to make any office renovation a green renovation.

This promise should be easier to keep than most of the others on the list as it is something that probably doesn’t come up every day or even every week. Unless you are masochistic and/or easily bored, you aren’t renovating the office very often. In fact, most of you have probably never renovated your offices and are just looking around now and thinking, “this place could use some sprucing up.” Well, before you spruce up take a minute and make sure your spruce is sustainable.

The home office we currently work out of hasn’t demanded too much in the way of renovations, and since we didn’t take before and after pictures it may be kind of hard to see what has changed. In order to better illustrate the green renovations we have made we have been forced to borrow before pictures that approximate the state in which the place began.

A Postgreen Renovation Example

(Before picture not actually of the Postgreen office.)

The Conference Table
We thought our original conference table was a little out of date and a lot uncomfortable.

So, we (by we I mean Chad) grabbed some construction scrap materials and some low VOC finish and went to work on building our beatiful new table for talking across. Now, we just need to find enough people who want to talk to us to make this thing look full.

There have been a few other small renovations like sealing doors & windows and low VOC painting and staining, but nothing really exciting. Don’t worry though. You’ll be the first to know if we undertake a larger, more interesting renovation project.

Chad’s Green Office Tips:

Performing office renovations falls outside of the realm of more minor items on the list like using CFL light bulbs and regulating the thermostat more wisely. A renovation could include painting the office, installing a new bathroom or kitchenette or simply setting up a new workstation for a new hire.

Below is a list of recommendations when embarking on such green renovations for the office. I do not go into detail on specific products as there are quite a number out there now and the list is growing every day. A simple Google search should reveal good options and if not, feel free to ask in the comments and we’ll look into an item for you.

1. Use Low or No VOC paints, stains, sealants, caulks and finishes of any kind.
2. Incorporate used items from a local thrift store or architectural salvage shop when possible.
3. Use low-flow plumbing fixtures including dual flush toilets when renovating kitchens and baths. If you are really adventurous, try a composting toilet.
4. Use recycled/reclaimed and low-VOC content materials when possible for things like flooring, tile and ceiling panels.
5. Consider possible solutions to encourage natural daylight and views for all employees.
6. When replacing HVAC equipment always use high-efficiency equipment and don’t be afraid to explore innovative solutions that may use significantly less energy such as natural ventilation.
7. When using lumber or sheet products, try to use FSC certified and zero formeldahyde products as much as possible.
8. Use local labor, material suppliers and consultants when renovating.
9. Be creative.

Many green renovations can also save money for new businesses tight on cash. For example, two used filing cabinets and a used door make a great desk for a fraction of the price and carbon footprint of a new one. Be creative and focus on the renovations that are going to provide you and your employees a healthier and more pleasurable work environment.

This post is part of our ongoing, 30 part series breaking down the Green Office Pledge. Sign up for the pledge and be sure to check out the rest of the series for more tips and anectdotes.