Eco-Responsibility When Working from Home

Theodoros Dimitrios Vougioukas, our Green Team intern, shares some of the tips that stood out to him while he was researching and brainstorming ideas about eco-responsible working.  

ELIA is committed to making environmentally responsible choices. The organisation does this by following the SHIFT Eco-Guidelines for Cultural Networks. This year, ELIA decided to adopt the optional guideline focused on encouraging team members to make eco-responsible choices when working from home. 

The truth is that working from home has become the norm in many workplaces since the COVID pandemic, including at ELIA. It was an essential measure during that time, and it proved to have many benefits for our team and its corresponding footprint. 

To raise awareness—and more importantly, to spark interest and start a conversation— as Green Team intern, I created a list of eco-friendly tips and ideas for the ELIA Team. The goal was to show that being eco-responsible when working from home can be fun and easy, and also a way of caring for ourselves and the world around us.  To make it a participative process, I also invited team members to add their own tips and ideas, with one simple rule: keep it fun! 

During my research and brainstorming, I noticed many different categories of sustainable tips that people can apply to their home working environments—like energy use, waste reduction, shopping and eating habits, mental well-being, and more. Actions like wearing warm and cozy clothes instead of turning up the heater, working in libraries or shared spaces instead of all alone in a room, taking a proper lunch break, making phone calls instead of video calls, and cleaning up your email inbox now and then, can all be seen as eco-responsible actions that care for the environment. 

In addition, while looking for eco-responsible stores, apps, and initiatives in the Netherlands to suggest to colleagues, I discovered a wide range of great options across different cities. For example, I hadn’t heard of the big list of zero-waste stores across Dutch cities, or of Plantenasiel Haarlem—an initiative that takes care of houseplants that can no longer stay in their original home and invites people to donate or adopt them—and even came across sustainable internet providers. 

In summary, this research helped me see that there are many ways to think about eco-responsibility while working from home. Most importantly, it also encouraged me to look beyond my own space—to the city level—to find ways to support more eco-friendly home working.