How are we doing our office operations greener and poorer?

GNM offices are based at Kings place in Central London. Photograph: PR

The guardian was moved to its new headquarters in the building of King cross more than two years ago, but is only now that we have been able to begin to fully optimize the management of the construction to reduce our environmental impact.

While Kings place has a "very good" rating of environment BREEM, the same effort that was put into developing the building was not reflected in helping tenants to use the facilities of the most effective way. Experts point to the fact that it is a common problem in many new buildings.

But with the introduction of improvements to it, including smart meters, the task force has made marked improvements to optimize the Kings place construction of systems and plants to align with the use of the building.

In fact, our headquarters rather than Kings carbon emissions fell 17 per cent in the final year of March 2011. A reduction of 800tCO2 was made possible by simple low-cost or no cost changes in the way that heat, cool and light the building, along with improvements (PC power downs and server virtualization). We have finished moving all officials of London rather than Kings. As a result of our efficiency tCO2 units equivalent full time in the year ending March 2011 fell by 5% to 2.7tCO2.

While it operates on a 24/7 basis, weekends and at night there is less personal work.

Effort has therefore made optimizing space heating and cooling to coincide with the use of the occupation. For example, air conditioning has closed weekends in specific areas.

Also has been optimized to reduce the time of the phase "a" activated automatic sensors PIR, reduce levels of Lux in less sensitive areas and the lighting power. These improvements have demonstrated a 50% reduction in power and double the service life of lamps.

To ensure even more improvements, the Board of Directors approved the installation of smart meters in GNM towards the end of the last financial year after a study of the Carbon Trust estimated a saving of around 5% on energy bills.

The monitoring system will enable substantially, to identify spikes, anomalies and location of use of energy, as well as ensure proper energy re-charges our owner.

The data may also help build the business case for the grouping after hours of workers in an area of the Office, which could reduce energy use by up to 75% in these times.

Analysis of the data also showed that we had an inefficient system for the cooling of our picture and newspaper archive on the site, resulting in additional costs of ￡ 70,000 per year. A new system will be in place during the exercise course.

Currently, 48% office products are certified or recycled sources. This includes role of office stationery and supplies aboard. Also have fallen deliveries of our supplier of Office Anglo's 3 times per week to once through orders consolidated. We are planning on the work with Anglo to improve reporting of sustainability of our purchases to better understand and reduce our impact.

We have recently launched waste of his love. The new waste and scheme of recycling at the headquarters of Guardian instead of Kings.

In line with better signage, bins and clear information that we wanted to associate the idea that we value things even when us them pull.

We want staff to understand that their wastes can become, feeding back the issues main pollution and our trash through the process of waste through monitoring product or valuable product. For example, through the Global generation, one of our partners in the community, local youth of BTEC in horticulture take our canteen waste, growing food and sells to us for lunch.?The project has shown that young people what is possible.

What was the key to the campaign was the recruitment of staff and obtain views of the different and varied people in our business. This includes workshops, talks by table and using our communication channels internal. We intend to maintain the momentum through improved information, comments, and a table of the League of waste per floor. Students form Eastley school, one of our partners in the community be Kings place waste audit.

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