What lies beneath

It's a dirty world way down at the bottom. No one likes cleaning out the very back of the kitchen cupboards, reaching into dark crevices and dingy corners, or taking a breath and confronting that abandoned Tupperware head-on. Cleaning up, real cleaning up, is neither easy, nor pretty.

This is perhaps why green marketing campaigns are so popular - often they're a commercial version of a light dusting or quick straightening of the furniture - it makes the room look tidy enough, and implies some sort of effort. Actually taking a peek under the carpet, however, means you're going to have to do some real work.

And when it comes to corporate clean-ups, this requires starting on the inside, and working your way out.

It's baffling that companies spend millions on greening programmes and efficient IT systems, without addressing the basic daily habits of their staff, which could potentially undo all the good their lean, mean carbon-slashing scheme is doing.

Employee education can mean more for a business than implementing the most elaborate green plan, simply by getting people to behave differently in their work environment. What's the point of rolling out a nationwide recycling drive for consumers when your own workers waste thousands of litres of water each day? Or redesigning your offices from scratch to attain “green building” status, while the marketing department prints thousands of documents for every meeting and greeting.

While the environmental focus is commendable, the approach is flawed. These kinds of initiatives have to start at the bottom, cleaning up at the basement level, instead of merely adding some “eco-friendly” window dressing.

Many of these basic changes aren't new or flashy or candidates for sexy marketing campaigns. But they are going to make the kind of everyday difference that benefits both the environment, and the bottom line. On several occasions, when asking companies about involving employees in green initiatives, the answer was: “Sure, awareness is important, but you can just automate systems and processes to do it for them.” How is this helping to create a culture of mindful consumption and responsibility?

Employee education can mean more for a business than implementing the most elaborate green plan.

Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb copy editor and journalist

When we have to, we can be pretty darn efficient. Mention the words “load-shedding” and soon we're switching off appliances and praising the quaint charm of candlelit dinners. Ask anyone who's had to go the weekend without water how quickly one finds ways of making every cupful last, and re-using whatever possible.

But as soon as the pressure eases up just a little bit, it seems as if all awareness goes out the window, and we're leaving taps running and lights blazing just because we can. If it's not an immediate emergency, it gets bumped down the mental chain of importance and we run on autopilot. But by the time these concerns become an everyday priority for millions of people worldwide, we'll be so far down the road our last-ditch conservation attempts will be hopelessly inadequate.

Given that people are at work for the majority of the day, motivating changes in this setting has two notable benefits - one, you cut down most of the energy and water people use in their day; and two, practising good habits in the workplace will hopefully be carried across to the home, with knock-on effects for the environment.

According to the UN Foundation, using energy more efficiently is the single most cost-effective mechanism there is to combat climate change, and should be the first line of attack against global warming. For much of the time, however, energy efficiency is something to slap on a label rather than a user approach. You can refit the entire company with power-saving PCs and have people leaving them running the whole night long. Technological solutions and systems can help make things more efficient, but they're merely tools that require effective use to do any good.

There have been several moves by industry recently encouraging research and investment in cleaner technologies. Last week, the American Energy Innovation Council, founded by leaders of some of the world's biggest businesses, called on the US government to increase spending on energy research by $11 billion. It's also made several recommendations, including the formation of an energy board and centres of excellence for energy R&D. All these efforts address part of the problem, but don't consider the bigger picture.

While greater investment in green energy solutions will go a long way to pioneering products and technologies that enable greater efficiency, no amount of scientific innovation is going to change our base behaviour towards the way we use resources. As Cummins CEO Tim Solso, one of the councils' founders, points out: “Innovation without implementation has no value”.

Technology alone cannot do all the work; we cannot simply invent ourselves out of the mess we've created. When faced with a house bearing all the evidence of years of neglect, it helps having a top-notch vacuum cleaner and hi-tech sprays and the entire Verimark line of cleaning gadgetry to get everything done better and faster. But you're not going to get very far unless you muster up the courage to venture down into the basement.

* Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb copy editor and journalist, finds it interesting that we spend extraordinary amounts of time and money working on hi-tech solutions to problems that can be helped through simple daily actions. We'll engineer and research and innovate relentlessly - anything to avoid curbing a lifestyle of convenience. It seems strange that a species built on millennia of evolution, remains so doggedly resistant to change.