Has your team signed up for the Sustainable Office Certification yet?

Has your team signed up for the Sustainable Office Certification yet through the Sustainability Engagement Institute?  It’s easy! Here is what one of our certified offices have to say about the process:

Transportation Services Team:

• Transportation Services and the Western Card/Box Office are thrilled to receive a silver Sustainable Office Certification.  We know that each department, office, and work team have enough autonomy to work towards being in align with the University Sustainable Action Plan and even go above and beyond. The Sustainable Office Certification is right in line with the work our department does which is to try to allow students to live in Bellingham car-free. 
• What did you learn? We learned that a lot of what our office is doing was in line with the sustainable office certification, and there were some things like having compost in our kitchenette that would be easy to implement. It was great to see how many student employees and permanent employees commute using active transportation, it turns out we have a lot of bike riders on our team!
• How easy was it to do this process? It was quite easy, once we started going through the metrics we quickly realized we could take small actions to get up to silver and we now are only a few steps away from upgrading to gold.
• What challenges did you encounter? Being a department that has employees and staff at four different sites and working a variety of different shifts, it was difficult to get everyone to participate and learn what each other are doing. We used a poll on teams to collect responses. 
• What inspired your team to engage in the certification? Our Director, Shelby Zimmerman, wanted our department to participate, which includes Parking Enforcement, Western Card, Western Box Office, and Transportation Services. Shelby has been leading the way in aligning our department with Westerns SAP. Aside  from becoming a Sustainable Office, other actions we have recently taken include purchasing a new electric vehicle for Parking Enforcement, helping students who commute from Oak Harbor set up a ride share program, and getting all employees free bus passes as an employee benefit.

Find out more at https://sustain.wwu.edu/sustainable-office-certification-soc.