DOINews: All DOI Employees: Employee Greening Tips

July 25, 2014

To: All DOI Employees

From: Rhea Suh, Assistant Secretary – Policy, Management and Budget

Subject: Employee Greening Tips

Have you ever wondered what your personal "carbon footprint" is? The Department is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), including providing assistance to employees in voluntarily reducing their personal carbon footprints. There are changes you can choose to make to reduce GHG emissions, reduce your carbon footprint, conserve the planet's resources, and realize cost savings.

The Department is glad to announce the availability of a new resource that all Department employees can voluntarily use to find ideas for reducing their carbon footprint. The new resource offers a variety of lifestyle and structural changes that can reduce carbon contributions and the impact our lifestyles have on the environment. Lifestyle changes are those that influence our daily decisions and activities, while structural changes are those made to the physical structure or landscape of your home. The link to the employee greening tips is: http://www.doi.gov/greening/employee-greening.cfm.

Not all changes need to be monumental or require a lot of time or money; rather, they are simple fixes. One example of a lifestyle change that can be implemented at no cost is turning down the brightness on your television; this adjustment can reduce power usage by as much as 15 percent. An example of a structural change that has a low initial cost is changing your home's air filter to medium or high efficiency filters. The new resource also has links, such as this one, providing calculators to estimate cost savings for energy efficient products - Energy and Cost Savings Calculators for Energy Efficient Products.

If you have any questions, please contact Willie R. Taylor, Director, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance (willie_taylor@ios.doi.gov), (202) 208-3891, or Kathleen Bartholomew, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance (kathleen_bartholomew@ios.doi.gov), (202) 208-3901.

PDF of signed memo on doi.gov