The government is scrapping charging for household rubbish in favour of a recycling rewards scheme. Which is more likely to cut rubbish and boost recycling?

UK government environment departments say £250m of cuts will have to come from conservation and green building schemes

Green organisations were today assessing how hard they would be hit by the £250m of cuts imposed by the coalition government.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will lose £162m, or 5.5% of its budget, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), a comparatively minor £85m, or 2.5%. But both departments said today they would not be able to deliver the savings solely by limiting recruitment and making in-house spending and would be forced to cut capital programmes.

Britain's 200,000 farmers and landowners, who receive tens of billions of pounds of European subsidies for owning land and growing food, will escape most of the cuts because European common agricultural policy payments are made directly from Brussels. But conservation and green building efforts may be severely hit by a significant withdrawal of funding for regional development agencies which subsidise many agricultural, environment and renewable energy schemes.

Defra, which oversees planning, recycling, waste and conservation efforts and large watchdog organisations like the Environment Agency and Natural England, said it would have to slash capital programmes "across the board". A spokeswoman said that it could take "weeks" to finalise details. "Nothing has been decided yet," she said.

However, she added that the cuts would include flood defence funding, surveillance of some diseases, and IT programmes for farmers. Many of Defra's "daughter" or "arm's-length" bodies like British Waterways are also expected to be hit hard.

Decc, which spends far less on administration than Defra, is expected to have to cut deeply into home energy-efficiency programmes which could undermine the public take-up of low-carbon technologies. "It will be challenging for Decc as it already has low administrative spend, so we will have to look at some of our programme work," said a spokesman. He added that budget cuts would be made to as yet unallocated funds and no existing programmes would be hit.

The department's three largest delivery bodies, the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust, are all expected to see budgets cut by an average of 1% this year.

The Environmental Transformation Fund, which invests in emerging low-carbon technologies, will see its budget for this year cut by 22% to £120m, and the Low-Carbon Building Programme (LCBP), a grant scheme to support the installation of clean energy technologies in homes, will end immediately and will not be extended. LCBP grants for electricity-generating systems such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines had already been withdrawn following the introduction of feed-in-tariffs that reward homeowners for each unit of clean power they produce. But until the government's announcement on Monday, grants were still available for heat-producing technologies such ground-source heat pumps and solar water heaters. The scheme is now closed to new applicants.

Although the ending of the LCBP is a relatively small cut – the savings will be just £3m – the announcement will most likely mean there will be no support for greener heating systems until at least spring 2011, when Labour's proposed Renewable Heat Incentive scheme is scheduled for launch.

Any cuts that Defra makes come on top of similar swingeing cuts made in 2007-08 and 2008-09 when £200m was slashed from the budgets of British Waterways, nature conservation organisations and other environment initiatives. "We have been cut to the bone already. There's not much left to slash," said one Defra insider today.

Environment groups reacted cautiously to the cuts. Ben Stafford, head of campaigns at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said: "The pledge to cut £600m from quangos looks politically attractive, although we don't at the moment know exactly where these cuts might fall. Ministers must recognise that cuts to public bodies will not always be consequence-free. A number perform important functions in the fields of planning and natural environment protection, and it is important that their departments champion these functions, including the ongoing importance of independent advice to ministers. Swinging the axe too vigorously now could mean greater costs later."

Paul King, the chief executive of the UK Green Building Council, said: "The coalition must be careful that the proposed abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies does not result in missed opportunities to deliver sustainable infrastructure, such as heat, water and waste across local authority borders. Integrated policy to deliver these services can offer carbon and cost savings – which can be missed if we don't have a regional overview."

The RSPB today urged the government to consider the health of the environment when it makes its decisions about where to cut and where to invest.

"We are calling to the government to freeze the costly and environmentally perverse Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation [which drives demand for unsustainable biofuels], protect existing co-financing funding for agri-environment schemes, invest in marine protected areas and end the investment by the nationalised banks in climate polluting activities," said a spokesman.

• Green building
• Recycling
• Conservation
• Renewable energy
• Solar power
• Wind power
• Energy
• Energy efficiency
• Waste
• Feed-in tariffs
• Endangered habitats
• Farming
• Water
• Economic policy
• Liberal-Conservative coalition

Should you peel off labels or rinse out cans? Where does used glass go? Take a few simple steps to better recycling

The average British recycling rate is just 18% of the collective bin – a long way off the 50% required by 2020. Expect local authorities to turn up the heat. RFID chips have already been fitted to wheelie bins in 68 local authorities. While residents in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, can face penalty fines of £100 for any non-horticulturally related items discovered in their garden-waste bins.

Most recycling is now "co-mingled" – recyclables are mixed in a box or bag. They are taken to a MRF (pronounced "murf" – a materials recycling facility) for sorting and grading, to the chagrin of the Campaign for Real Recycling (realrecycling.org.uk), which wants single collections.

By all means rinse out cans, but don't peel labels off or remove plastic windows from envelopes, as these will be melted off in the MRFs. Precycle: choose the product that comes in the least packaging, or bring your own bag. Also, think compost. Up to 35% of the bin is made of kitchen/organic waste.

As generic recycling has modest aims – glass goes to road aggregate and old clothes are sold on as cheap clothes to Sub-Saharan Africa – divert any material you can. Traid.org.uk recycles clothes but also customises and reworks them for resale via its shops. Or join the British Zero Waste Alliance (zwallianceuk.org). No waste, no bin, no recycling.

• Recycling
• Ethical and green living

Thanks to the success of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, there are now millions of pairs of 3D glasses kicking around. But what happens to them?

• Lucy Siegle: Can I wear glasses or contacts and be green?

When Alice in Wonderland screened in cinemas earlier this year it was estimated that around 10m pairs of plastic 3D glasses were distributed worldwide. A similar number had been sent out when Avatar was released a few months earlier; if the notional 42.1m pairs of glasses used to watch the film had been laid end-to-end, they would form a line 3,987 miles long. So, is this ever-growing number of glasses a potential environmental menace?

Cineworld, which operates 77 cinemas across the UK, admits that "due to the success of 3D, the volume of glasses that require disposal has become an increasing concern". It says it plans to reduce the price of a ticket to any customer recycling their glasses. From today customers at Odeon cinemas will buy glasses for £1 but get a discount – the Odeon doesn't say how much – each time the glasses are reused.

Meanwhile, Vue Cinemas, with 69 cineplexes across the UK, has large recycling bins in its cinemas. "The glasses are taken to be cleaned and repackaged," says a spokesman. "Any that are damaged go to plastic recycling and are made into pellets, for use in the plastics industry."

Imax, the Canadian high-definition cinema corporation, boasts its glasses can be washed up to 500 times, but, in reality, how many times are 3D glasses recycled? Vue says the average pair has "around three or four uses". With 3D films expected to account for 25-30% of box office receipts in 2010, it says it will "use around 7m pairs of 3D glasses in 2010". That's a formidable mountain of scratched glasses queueing up to be pelletised.

However, one Californian firm thinks it might have the answer. Cereplast is to distribute "compostable" glasses made from plant-based plastics which biodegrade within six months. That sounds good, but glasses made from popcorn would be better: we could eat them when the credits start to roll.

• Ethical and green living
• 3D
• Recycling
• Waste

They may promote green values, but summer music gatherings are often the biggest culprits in terms of carbon emissions and waste

For an event that usually takes place in a field, the average festival is far from a green affair. Emissions from travel to and from the sites, the mounds of litter and those diesel-guzzling on-site generators mean that, while a lot of major festivals promote a green ethos in principle, their actual carbon footprints tell a different story.

Oxford university researchers have analysed the environmental impact of 500 UK festivals and found that, combined, they emit around 84,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. Research from campaign group A Greener Festival shows that the green issue is a high priority for some music fans, with 48% of respondents saying they would pay more for greener events and 36% stating that green issues were an important factor when buying a ticket. So what are festivals doing to respond to this demand?

The experts are in unanimous agreement when assessing which part of a festival has the biggest impact on the environment: transport. According to Julie's Bicycle, an organisation set up to help the music industry reduce its carbon footprint, moving people to and from festivals contributes 68% of the festival sector's total emissions – around 45,000 tonnes.

In response to this, lift-sharing initiatives such as the Glastonbury Car Share Scheme have been set up across most of the major festivals. Latitude places a strong emphasis on sustainable travel by offering people who lift-share the chance to win a VIP upgrade. However, it is clear that festivals still need to do more to make public transport to the sites widely available, and to encourage people to use it.

A major headache for the big festivals is the question of how to deal with the major side-effect of having a party with a 100,000-strong guest list – namely, the heaps of litter. Most provide recycling facilities on-site that make it easy for people to separate their rubbish. Interestingly, Festival Republic – responsible for promoting Glastonbury, Reading and Latitude – tailors its wast-management schemes to different audiences, so that younger crowds like those seen at Reading and Leeds are offered incentives to dispose of rubbish properly in the form of beer and money. Forty nine per cent of the rubbish at Glastonbury was recycled last year through the use of clearly labelled recycling facilities. Even so, an army of litter pickers is deployed every year for a week following the festival to clean up after messy guests, proving that there is still much to be done.

A growing trend among some festivals is clean energy generation. The Croissant Neuf Summer Party in Wales runs entirely on power from renewable sources, but larger festivals will struggle to generate enough electricity to power themselves in this way.

One thing is for sure: there is a world of difference between possessing good green intentions and having the resources and organisation to put them into practice – especially for the larger gatherings. Ben Challis, from A Greener Festival, says: "We have noticed that the smaller festivals are better for dealing with environmental concerns but the big festivals do have a lot to consider. A proposal to put recycling bins everywhere could clash with health and safety or crowd regulations, for example."

In 2009, Bestival and the Isle of Wight were the only big UK festivals to receive an "outstanding" award from A Greener Festival for their commitments to reducing their impact on the environment. Let's hope that more of the big festivals can clean up their acts this year.

• Carbon emissions
• Travel and transport
• Pollution
• Waste
• Recycling
• Renewable energy
• Energy
• Reading and Leeds festival
• Glastonbury
• Latitude festival
• Festivals

The supermarket is the first in the UK to convert its entire range of 25cl bottles to an environmentally friendly plastic

Small bottles of wine, often provided as an in-flight tipple, will this week become a shade greener. Marks & Spencer is the first UK retailer to convert its entire range of 25cl still wine bottles from glass to environmentally friendly plastic, meeting growing consumer demand for lighter and "unbreakable" containers.

M&S reports that sales of 25cl bottles (the equivalent of two standard glasses) have rocketed as the warm weather encouraged shoppers to buy them as a convenient drink for picnics. It typically sells around 100,000 mini bottles a week, and last week sales were up 26% year-on-year.

The new bottles are 88% lighter than glass bottles, less energy is required to manufacture a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle than a glass bottle and the lightweight bottle reduces distribution emissions. The company estimates that the switch will save it 525 tonnes of packaging a year.

Sainsbury's has already introduced PET for standard 75cl bottles but not yet for its small bottle range, which covers 32 wines. Waitrose is also launching a Shiraz and Chenin Blanc in a 75cl plastic bottle. The new PET plastic, screw-top wine bottles will launch at the end of the May at stores near key festivals and outdoor events.

The Waitrose wine buyer Nick Room said: "Wine-drinkers can be quite precious about compromising on taste and quality, which is something we have been very careful to ensure doesn't happen with the new plastic packaging. In fact, the bottles actually have an extended shelf-life guaranteed for 12 months and proven for 24 months, highlighting that the product is as good as glass for wine quality and 100% recyclable which is an added benefit to the environment."

The wine industry has been working to reduce packaging, in particular with the government's waste agency Wrap, through its Glassrite project. Last year, the UK imported over 1.7bn 75cl bottles of wine which equates to over 600,000 tonnes of packaging.

A spokesman for the Wine and Spirits Trade Association (WSTA) said: "There's clearly an appetite for buying wine in different quantities and we know from our own research that consumers are open to new forms of packaging. Many parts of the industry are looking at ways of reducing their environmental impact. Given that most wine sold in the UK is imported it also makes sound economic sense to look at lightweight glass or alternatives."

• Recycling
• Waste
• Landfill
• Carbon footprints
• Carbon emissions
• Ethical and green living
• Marks & Spencer
• Supermarkets
• Wine
• Consumer affairs

If the kiosks reduce landfill, great – but the environmental impact of building and running them may negate their savings

PepsiCo, the global food and drinks corporation, is currently making a lot of noise about its new Dream Machine. It's a recycling kiosk which offers incentives to customers (to date, only those in the US) for dropping off their empty cans and bottles. Rewards include branded baseball caps, discounted PepsiCo products and movie tickets. A donation is also made to a US charity which helps wounded veterans get back into work.

PepsiCo has gone to great lengths to launch its new innovation, particularly online where it is hoping it will "go viral" and appeal to the Pepsi-swilling generation. For example, it has called upon the services of Aisha Tyler, the US actor who has appeared in 24, Friends and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, to help promote the launch with a comedy video for the satirical website Cracked.com.

In addition to this video, the Dream Machine has the obligatory Facebook page, as well as a Youtube channel. It's here that we find possibly the most vomit-inducing corporate videos of recent years.

Having watched this video, you would be forgiven for thinking that PepsiCo has developed and built a fusion reactor out of discarded aluminium cans. Sadly, our dreams of a deuterium-fuelled future must continue without realisation. But if we view this machine at face-value, what conclusions should we draw?

The first thing to say is that anything that improves the woeful levels of recycling when it comes to drinks cans and plastic bottles should be welcomed. Yes, local authorities and retailers provide recycling drop-off points, but millions of these things still end up in landfill. If PepsiCo's Dream Machines can demonstrably improve recycling rates then great.

But then the questions begin. For example, how much energy does it take to build and run these huge machines? And does this negate the energy savings achieved by recycling the items which pass into their bellies?

PepsiCo has been reported as saying that these machine use as much power each year "as a home computer". No word, though, on how much energy and resources it takes to make the machines.

But perhaps a more pertinent question – if reducing the environmental impact of these otherwise disposable items is the goal – is whether you should be encouraging yet more consumption of these products via your reward schemes.

• Recycling
• Waste
• Landfill
• Ethical and green living

Loo roll is among our top five 'eco crimes'. But without a bidet or copies of the Guardian, is there a sustainable option?

I couldn't make it to ISSA Interclean, the "world's leading trade fair for the cleaning industry", in Amsterdam last week. It's a shame really, because, in the true spirit of gonzo journalism, I could have road-tested a new product called Satino Black, which claims to be the "most environmentally friendly toilet paper in the world". (I like to think it the kind of assignment Hunter S Thompson would have relished – but without the need for any psychedelic drugs.) Alas, we must trust the manufacturer's claims instead:

Satino Black is the only truly CO2-neutral toilet paper made with 100% recycled paper and an environmentally friendly production process, and yet it is just as soft and white as normal toilet paper.

"Many users do not know that for the largest part toilet paper is still made of trees which are chopped down for that specific reason. That is totally unnecessary. That's why we manufacture Satino Black from 100% recycled paper," says Henk van Houtum, director of Van Houtum. "In addition, we have developed a new production process during the last two-and-a-half years to replace all the harmful chemicals with biologically degradable raw materials and additives"

The water and energy consumption for the production of Satino Black are already the lowest in the world in the market segment. CO2 neutrality is guaranteed as a result of the utilisation of 100% green energy. Cradle to Cradle guarantees that chemicals for the production of Satino Black are converted to natural and biologically degradable auxiliary agents. It is harmless for humans as well as the environment.

I suppose it had to happen. With the use of toilet paper identified by New Scientist last December among our "top five eco crimes", someone was always going to try to steal a march on their competitors by producing the "greenest" toilet roll. With large sections of the western world not showing much interest in using a bidet, dock leaves or copies of the Guardian, there is probably a genuine need for such a product. And, as we must assume that Sheryl Crow's request in 2007 that we only use one sheet of toilet roll per visitation went largely unheeded, the sheer quantities of dead trees we now use to nettoyer nos derrières demands a new approach.

As Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council, said last year: "Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution."

I have a feeling that Van Houtum, the Dutch paper manufacturer responsible for Satino Black, might be slightly overplaying its hand, though:

It's so easy to go green. Making a different choice isn't easy – you need guts and perseverance. We can help you make that change right now. One simple action will bring your goal of sustainability even closer. Like so many others have, make the switch to Satino Black – the most eco-friendly toilet paper and hand towels ever. It's the ultimate proof that you dare to care.

No, I'd say this is the ultimate proof that you dare to care …

• Ethical and green living
• Recycling

As Grand Designs Live opens, TV presenter Kevin McCloud selects 10 products from recycled scourers to insulating blinds

• The Guardian's guide to greening your home
• Green your home playing cards by Julia King

There are lots of points to make about this fabric. But the main one is that it does everything a synthetic fabric can achieve (meeting fire ratings, "rub tests", resistance to fading and so on) while being made out of nettles and old wool, the two things you'll be almost guaranteed to find in a British field, together with barbed wire. There's nothing barbed about this fabric, however – it may be ethical but it doesn't sting or itch. Like linen, which is another natural fabric made from plant fibre, Sting is beautiful and glamorous.

When it comes to specifying sheet materials for a new kitchen or some cupboards, recycled plastics often get overlooked, usually because they look like frozen sick. Smile Plastics, however, have begun making sheet plastics made from single source plastics: recycled and chopped CDs for example, which give the material the iridescence of abalone or mother-of-pearl. This is upcycled plastic. I chose it for this list because I wanted designers and architects to see it and specify it, as well as consumers.

This product is almost too technical to describe. An egg-crate panel of little rotating eyes follow the sun all day long like a sunflower, collecting direct sunlight and distributing it through a building via a network of fibre-optic cables. This is ideal for introducing light into earth-sheltered or buried buildings or the thousands of London homes now retro-fitted with three underground storeys. It is brilliant. Literally.

Giles is a designer-maker of extraordinary pedigree who examines the value and the usefulness of everything he utilises. So he forces us to re-evaluate materials like corrugated cardboard as not only durable and utilitarian, but also beautiful. We already ran the Grand Designs Awards and these are judged by a panel of luminaries from the worlds of design and sustainability. But choosing this range of cardboard furniture and the other green products here was a much simpler exercise – and much more personal. These are products and inventions that I've chosen because I like them, I've used or tested them and I wanted them to get more exposure.

Hemcrete is a walling material that can be sprayed or cast like concrete, but it's made from lime and hemp. It performs both as an insulant and as a thermal-mass and it locks up carbon as it grows. The average hemp house can stow away about 20 tonnes of CO2 into its walls this way, about 40 kilogrammes for every square metre of wall in comparison with a traditional brick, block and cavity wall which is responsible for the production of about 100kg for every square metre. And hemp is the second-fastest growing crop on the planet after bamboo, so it can be slotted in between other crops during a growing season. It also requires almost no inputs and enriches the soil.

I remember clearly the day – as if it were yesterday – that someone told me that toilet roll wasn't made from recycled paper. What do you mean? Surely it's got to be, it only gets used once? The same goes for scourers and cleaners. You'd sort of expect throwaway bits of foam and gritty green plastic to be of the very cheapest grades of recycled plastic. But not a bit of it. They're all manufactured from virgin petrochemicals. I can understand that the acrylic used for making DVDs, that are read by lasers and spun at 200mph, needs to be perfect and crystal clear. But not my clothes pegs.

We all know about sheepswool insulation that comes from New Zealand or other far-flung outreaches of the world of sheep. It is highly breathable, natural, people-friendly and hygroscopic, regulating the moisture content in a cavity such as a wall. Very, very useful in timber framed buildings where condensation and moisture can dissolve the building into wet rot. And Black Mountain is British. Home-grown. Many of our sheep are bred to be shorn twice a year but only get fleeced once because the market for wool is so depressed. If we all bought sheepswool for our attics the flocks of Britain would be much more comfortable.

Since Becquerel used selenium to experiment with photovoltaics in 1836, and Horace de Saussure captured solar heat in his homemade "hotbox" in 1767, the two disciplines of using solar energy to produce either electricity or hot water have remained separate. Until a very short while ago when some brilliant German physicists decided to circulate the water from solar thermal panels around the electronics in solar photovoltaic panels providing – bingo – a faster-than-normal supply of hot water. The resulting panel also produces electricity more efficiency than a standard photovoltaic panel.

Heatsaver is an American firm that make insulated window blinds from the multilayer thin insulation sold for roofspaces which looks like the covering of a Nasa spaceship. Heatsaver uses a less complex structure in its product, which has the appearance of interlined cream linen Roman blinds and the thermal performance of several inches of plastic foam. Their secret, however, lies in a specially designed channel on the wall, in which the blind slides, forming an effective seal. There is no better way of keeping heat inside a building with large glazed walls or a listed building that is single-glazed.

We throw away 486,000 tonnes of tyres every year in Britain. Tirex carpet tiles are recycled — with a minimum of processing — by slicing old tyres and rubber machinery belts into long French fries and then bonding them together side-on. The durable fabric webbing that is inside the tyre wall is exposed as the top surface of the carpet and the resulting texture is a revelation. Interface Flor sell it as "entrance matting" but Tirex doesn't look anything like a tyre. Its colours are grey and brown. It is elegant and sophisticated and every office in the world and quite a few homes ought to be carpeted with it.

• Energy efficiency
• Energy
• Recycling
• Ethical and green living

We're used to recycling and saving energy at home, so why are we still so lax about it at the office? Green Office Week is the perfect time to change this, says Homa Khaleeli

On Saturdays I arm myself with my ever-growing stash of cloth bags and go to the market. Every night I switch off my electrical equipment at the wall instead of leaving it on standby and wash all my clothes at 30C. I have even given up my car, so while I'm hardly a green campaigner, I wouldn't say I'm a carbon-guzzling monster.

Yet come Monday morning, it's a different story. Fed up with staring at a screen, I often print out documents scores of pages long. I leave my computer on standby overnight and don't even notice the strip light over my desk is switched on at noon on a sunny day.

Depressingly, it seems my Jekyll and Hyde approach to green issues isn't unique. One in three office workers admits laziness stops them being green, according to a new survey commissioned to coincide with Green Office Week, which starts on Monday. Only 11% consciously choose green office supplies and just 34% chose to consume less energy in a bid to reduce their working carbon footprint.

So why are we all so lax the moment we step into work? Occupational psychologist Professor John Arnold of Loughborough University's business school thinks it's all to do with diffusion of responsibility – we are hoping someone else will take control.

"People in big organisations tend to think someone else will do it, particularly if there is a person whose job it is to reduce our energy," he says. Which might be why I am happy to sort my recycling into the three different bins provided, but hadn't even thought about making sure the lights above my desk were switched off.

Another stumbling block is that we don't just have to deal with excess energy waste at work – we are also guilty of producing it. "At home you are recycling things you are not responsible for producing; junk mail or excess packaging in shopping," says Arnold. "You don't make them, so you feel better by recycling. If you have a can at home it's as easy to put it in the recycling bin as the waste. But at work you are generating the stuff yourself, printing off documents all the time."

This in turn makes being careful a little more difficult, according to Arnold: "Do you print on both sides of the paper or even ask for a printer that works on both sides? It's a two-stage process – a production end and a discard end. It's more to think about and less easy – you have to take more trouble."

It seems that sidestepping responsibility like this can have a big impact when as many as two-thirds of office workers say they were not aware that their organisation had any environmental targets in place, and when one-third of all UK offices still do not have any recycling facilities.

Yet people who want to take action can also fear being branded an "eco-nag", according to Donnachadh McCarthy, who set up an environmental consultancy called 3 Acorns Eco-audits.

"I definitely think that people who are green at home sometimes feel they don't have the permission to be green at work," says McCarthy, who has London's first carbon-negative house. "This could be because of management or their colleagues."

This is something Jamie Fewings, an architect from Worthing, understands. He is careful to keep his carbon footprint down at home, buying organic fruit and vegetables from farmers' markets or small shops and taking the train to work instead of driving. But, he says, he is aware that not everyone in his office shares his outlook.

"I don't do as much in the office, because other people around you might be more cynical or not believe as strongly in that kind of thing," Fewings says. "I don't want to preach about my principles, but I try to do subtle things to make a change. Architects use a lot of paper and I recycle what I use, but if I see someone else has put paper in the waste bin I take it out and put it in the recycling."

This ties into another stumbling block that McCarthy has identified to being green at work – there are just so many more people to take into account. He says one of the quickest ways of lowering energy use is by reducing the office's temperature to the recommended 19C. Every degree higher, he says, adds 10% extra on the company's gas bill.

But, he admits: "In some ways it's more difficult to be green at work because we have to negotiate lighting and temperature with our colleagues, which means crossing lines which you would not have to do at home."

Which is why, Arnold says, individual eco-conscious people must be committed to making a difference in an organisation. "You have to make it public and keep doing it – put up with the teasing and people saying, 'there they go again'."

The good news is that most people are willing to put in extra effort, Arnold says; they are just waiting for someone to take the lead. "People say they would love to do more but there is no place to talk about it."

And McCarthy agrees that one person's actions can really make an impact. "Do it yourself and spread the message; you can make an enormous difference. I used to always have the light in my office off when I worked for a charity. At first people would say, 'It's so dark in here.' But then they would realise it wasn't dark – the other offices were just too brightly lit. In the end it spread through the office."

Jay Risbridger, who has been running the Green Stationery Company for 20 years, agrees. In the early years of his business, half the battle was explaining the issues behind recycling and buying products that would last to reduce waste. Now that is no longer a problem. But he says there are still just two types of businesses that put their money where their environmental principles are. The first are ideological small businesses, such as environmental charities or consultants. The second are companies whose individual stationery buyers happen to care about green issues. "They do it as a personal initiative. They tend to be administrators and they tend to be women; about 80% of our customers are women."

Of course the ideal solution to being green at work is for employers to tackle the problems. Arnold thinks the best thing offices can do is change the messages coming from bosses. "Work culture does matter; when things [green efforts] are measured and when rewards are linked to them, they become important and shape behaviour," he says. "It has to be modelled by senior management, which is true of any intervention. It should come from the top or people won't take it seriously."

That's something McCarthy agrees with: "We believe in measure, measure, measure. People pay attention to what you measure." When boards and bosses are given results and employees get feedback, they start thinking and caring more about green issues.

Thankfully, says Arnold, this doesn't have to be hi-tech or time-consuming. "When I was on sabbatical in Australia, if the cleaner found waste in your recycling bin, they would put a sad-face sticker on your desk and a smiley-face sticker if you were good. It really worked – I did not want a sad-face sticker!"

Green Office Week starts on Monday

1 Switch everything off. Turn off your PC, printers and lights before you go home. Donnachadh McCarthy says in some offices, cleaning staff who work late leave the lights on so office workers don't arrive to darkness; but this can waste hours of energy.

2 Reject plastic cups. Bring in your own mug and save waste.

3 Use green stationery. Persuade whoever buys your stocks to order Forest Stewardship Council approved/environmentally friendly products where possible. Reuse old envelopes and packaging by using labels to cover the old addresses.

4 Use recycling bins. Remove individual bins and replace with group recycling ones in strategic areas. Putting a recycling bin near the desk also works to remind you to reduce your waste.

5 Turn off mobile phone chargers at the socket when phones are charged.

6 Reduce the heat. If there is a debate about how warm your office should be, the recommended temperature is 19C.

7 Think before you print. See if you can go a whole day without printing documents – if you must, try to print on both sides of the paper.

8 Set up a green ideas scheme that encourages and rewards green thinking in your company.

• Work & careers
• Recycling
• Waste
• Carbon footprints