BackTalk: Go Green!

Libraries, with their collective mission of sharing books and other materials for use by communities of users, are the quintessential green organization. But we can implement additional “green” strategies and do even more good for the planet, set a good example for our constituents, and save money.

Are you building a new or renovating your existing library? If so, when planning your project, try to adhere to certain principles and practices: use regionally sourced building materials to reduce the transportation burden and recycled building materials when appropriate.

Be sure to plan for maximum natural light, energy-efficient lighting design, and enhanced water efficiency, including low-flow plumbing fixtures and landscape irrigation that uses reclaimed water.

Paper is something that all libraries use, so make an effort to purchase paper with a high percentage of recycled content. Once paper is used in the library, make efforts to recycle it. Put recycle bins in appropriate staff and public locations and mark them well.

It can make a difference. At the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder, over the course of one year the library recycled more than 88,000 pounds of paper, resulting in the following estimated savings: 748 40' fir trees; 2,641 pounds of air pollutants; 180,563 kilowatt hours of electricity; 138.9 cubic yards of landfill space; 883.6 gallons of gasoline; and 308,128 gallons of water.

Encouraging staff and library users to reduce the amount of paper they consume is also important. Wherever, possible provide instructions on how to print more efficiently by using print preview, print selected pages, and copy and paste from web pages. Suggest emailing articles or other resources whenever possible. While not popular with patrons, fee-based printing does help reduce unnecessary paper use.

Power management for library PCs and other equipment is still one of the best ways to reduce the energy used by your library. A computer uses about 120 watts per hour, i.e., if you have 100 computers in your library, each on for ten hours per day, 300 days per year, you're consuming a lot of energy and running up quite an electric bill! While much of that can't be eliminated, there are things your library can do to help reduce consumption.

Start by purchasing Energy Star–compliant computer equipment, and use all the available “power management features” that won't negatively impact library services or staff productivity. For example, set your monitors to enter a low-power usage mode when idle. Monitors consume the most power of the various components and having them asleep has the least impact on the system's ability to do things, so it makes sense to focus on them.

Energy Star–compliant monitors should power down to 15 watts or less after 30 minutes of inactivity and to eight watts or less after an accumulated 60 minutes of inactivity, saving up to 90 percent of the electricity used by a monitor. Depending on how much idle time your staff and public computers have, the savings from power management could be significant. Though still more expensive than their CRT counterparts, LCD monitors can save considerable amounts of electricity—and thus money—over the life of a monitor.

Oh, and skip the screensavers. They don't do anything to conserve electricity. Their purpose is to protect monochrome screens from having images burned into them, and they are somewhat of an anachronism at this point, anyway. Some screensavers may actually prevent the sleep mode from being activated. Make sure other equipment such as printers and copiers also are Energy Star–compliant.

Finally, enact policies that recommend staff turn off PCs and monitors on nights and weekends and at other appropriate times, depending, of course, on local network and other requirements regarding system updates or backups. In the “olden days” of PCs, turning off a computer to conserve electricity might have done more harm than good because drive heads didn't always park at shutdown, and the power surge to the computer might have harmed other parts.

Nowadays, computers can be turned off and on with much greater frequency without fear of causing damage. This is easy to implement for staff PCs, and on the plus side, the system's memory would be regularly purged and any antivirus updates that get loaded at boot time would be more regularly installed. The real plus, however, will be greater energy savings on electricity, more money saved during these tough fiscal times, and, naturally, you'll be doing something good for the environment.