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How to create:

Sustainable Offices

Creating sustainable offices and workplaces requires small but meaningful actions. By making more informed purchasing decisions, such as buying products that are reusable, evergreen, and made of sustainable materials, we can collectively reduce the demand for disposable and single-use items that go to landfills and negatively impact climate, health, and equity.

The Harvard Office for Sustainability created a Sustainable Office Guide as a starting point for offices and workplaces to begin their sustainability journeys:

Sustainable Office Guide Tips:

Follow these office tips to help your team make sustainable purchasing decisions that prioritize climate, health, and equity:

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Tip # 1

Use resources like the Harvard Sustainable Meeting & Event Guide and Sustainable Purchasing Guide.


Tip #2

Reduce exposure to “chemical classes of concern” in purchased products.

  • Choose BPI-certified compostable food service products (made without PFAS).
  • When appropriate, avoid antimicrobial hand soaps, products treated for water resistance or stain-repellents, and furniture with added chemical flame retardants.
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Tip #3

Purchase reusables and bulk items instead of disposables and single-use items.

For example, instead of individual coffee pod systems, opt for bean-to-cup coffee machines so you can use your favorite fair-trade coffee.


Tip #4

For giveaways (“swag”), choose evergreen items people will use repeatedly.

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Printer Icon

Tip #5

Replace personal printers with shared equipment connected to a managed print environment (e.g., Crimson Print).


Tip #6

Conveniently place compost, recycling, and trash bins with the latest signage.

Recycling bins icon, one with a glass bottle, another with a paper, and another with a plastic bottle

Icon of Light bulb with  a leaf in the middle

Tip #7

Support colleagues in implementing energy-efficient actions whenever possible such as:

  • Power down computers and electronics at the end of the day or before vacations.
  • Choose LED bulbs & install motion-sensor lights in common areas.
  • Ensure your community knows how to report resource conservation issues (e.g., leaking faucets) to building management.
  • Sign up for Demand Response notifications by emailing uos_operations@harvard.edu.

Tip #8

Work with HUIT (or local IT group) and FMO to properly dispose of electronic waste.

Broken phone and computer mouse icon

Icon of three people setting up a tent

Tip #9

Set aside unwanted office supplies to donate to Freecycle events or reuse rooms.


Tip #10

Choose “100% recycled” or “tree-free” paper products.

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Ready to make more informed, sustainable purchasing decisions for your office? Contact rachel_martinez@harvard.edu to request the Sustainable Office Worksheet, a resource designed by the Harvard Office for Sustainability to help purchasers follow best practices.

Sustainable Office Guide

The guide enables offices to make informed purchasing and operations decisions that help advance Harvard’s mission to accelerate action on climate, health, and equity.

Download the Sustainable Office GuideOpens new window

A photo of the Sustainable Office Guide cover with tips on how to create a sustainable office.
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Sustainability Resources

Explore sustainability resources at Harvard.

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Upcoming Events

April

10

Thursday
12:00 pm-1:00 pm GMT+0000

Open to Harvard Community

Spring HGSE Green Team Meeting

green team
Harvard Graduate School of Edcuation

All HGSE students, faculty, and staff interested in making our school healthier and more sustainable are encouraged to join the HGSE Green Team! Come enjoy a (free!) plant-based and planet-friendly lunch and connect with each other to exchange ideas and explore collaborations. Please RSVP for this in-person event by Wednesday, April 2nd for the meeting so we can plan accordingly to avoid food waste. 

March

06

Thursday
12:30 pm-5:00 pm GMT+0000

African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field

The African Landscape Architectures conference brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. This two-day hybrid event highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

March

05

Wednesday
4:30 pm-5:30 pm GMT+0000

FLP Speaker Series: Food and Social Media with Emily J.H. Contois

Join the Harvard Food Literacy Project for a special virtual book talk with editor and Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, Emily J.H. Contois. The book, titled, ‘Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation,’ examines the ways in which we relate to food and how social media — especially Instagram, and more recently, TikTok — has influenced that relationship. During the presentation, Dr. Contois will cover a high-level overview of the book, its contributing writers, as well as some discussion about how social media is part of our food lives. About the book: “Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.”
VISIT EXTERNAL LINK

March

05

Wednesday
1:00 pm-2:00 pm GMT+0000

Gnoseologies: Postapocalyptic Futures: Visionary Landscapes in Northern Peru ~ A Conversation with Anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

In this conversation with Gnosologies host Giovanna Parmigiani, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, shows how sentient mountains and lakes (Apus) channeled by Northern Peruvian shamans address the greatest challenges of our current climate crisis: overcoming our anthropocentrism, our sole focus on human welfare, and justice for humans at the expense of the planet. Bacigalupo argues that by healing epistemic fractures between subject and object, matter and spirit, humans and ecosystems, Apus teach us planetary ethics, restoring our belongingness to the earth.
Bacigalupo discusses how Apus also offer a collective vision of humanity’s future as climate change ravages the world. By decentering the human and gaining awareness of the inevitable end of the space-time of modern industrial civilization and humanity—and of a world that will continue to exist without us—Apus inspire us to respond to the climate crisis. When we accept that humanity will ultimately be destroyed by climate change events, Apus reason, we might mitigate our suffering by engaging in ethical, reciprocal, multispecies relationships to postpone the end of humanity and to reimagine our existence as insects and birds in a post-human world.

Bacigalupo asks, “What could be the implications for our climate crises of truly decentering the human? How might sentient landscapes define and advocate for collective ethics and climate justice? And what kinds of postapocalyptic visions could trigger our moral responsibility toward the earth?”

March

04

Tuesday
4:00 pm-5:00 pm GMT+0000

Artist Talk with Alia Farid

In this opening program for her Radcliffe exhibition, the artist Alia Farid will discuss her newly commissioned artwork Talismans (Kupol LR 3303). Crafted from petroleum-based plastics and thus freighted with the geopolitical and climate implications of this material’s manufacturing, Talismans (Kupol LR 3303) sets her ancestral stories against the backdrop of global events.

March

09

Sunday
11:00 am-12:00 pm GMT+0000

Exploring the World of Rot

Harvard Museum of Natural History

We may not always notice, but our world is rotten. Rot—the process of breaking down once-living materials of our planet—is, in fact, a major part of what makes our world livable. Join environmental educator Britt Crow-Miller for a fun, curiosity-filled and hands-on journey through her book, World of Rot (Storey Publishing, 2024). In this one-hour session, participants will learn the what, where, when, and why of decomposition and get up close to some of the organisms at work in nature’s recycling system. Get ready to meet some hungry fungi, slimy slugs, and wiggly worms–some of these will be alive!

April

22

Tuesday
12:00 pm-2:00 pm GMT+0000

Open to Harvard Community

2025 Earth Day Celebration on Science Center Plaza

Earth Day

Join the Harvard Office for Sustainability and Harvard Common Spaces for an Earth Day Festival on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 from 12 to 2 pm at the Science Center Plaza!

April

28

Monday
12:00 pm-1:00 pm GMT+0000

Students, Schools and Our Climate Moment

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Attend this talk in which Laura A. Schifter and Jonathan Klein highlight the many ways in which K-12 schools and students have tremendous potential to advance solutions on environmental issues, and they provide frameworks for enacting change, in Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment. Schifter and Klein demonstrate how the effects of climate change intersect with US public schools on multiple levels—for example, schools must prepare students to face the challenges of an uncertain future, accommodate disruptions brought about by extreme weather conditions, and evaluate their systems’ energy consumption and carbon emissions.

March

05

Wednesday
1:00 pm-2:00 pm GMT+0000

Environments for Health and Happiness: A Seminar with Dr. Lindsey Burghardt

On Wednesday, March 5th, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G12 or online, please join us for the fourth installment of our Environments for Health and Happiness Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, Chief Science Officer at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.