Make Green Happen
Try Tree-Free Paper
By Ana Toepel and Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact, (originally run on UCSF's Sustainability Website) When you load a ream of paper into the copy machine, you might not realize the environmental impacts your choice of paper could have. Now there is a new choice to...
The A,B,Cs of Reef-Safe Sunscreens
By Ana Toepel and Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact, July 2018 (originally run on UCSF's Sustainability Website) Summer might be over, but with the unseasonable warm fall we are having in California, it seems timely to highlight how to protect ourselves and the planet...
Global Climate Action Summit: Moving From Talk to Action
A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change, as summarized in the New York Times, paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage...
Two Reasons to Think Twice About Taking a Receipt
Written by Ana Toepel, originally run on UCSF's sustainability website. When you are at the café or grocery store and handed a receipt, you may not even think twice about taking it. But it turns out that this small, seemingly insignificant slip of paper...
A Greener Valentine’s Day: 5 Ways to Align With Your Love for the Planet
You survived the holidays. But are you ready for the next big consumer-oriented holiday: Valentine’s Day? I am a romantic at heart (I painted the heart painting above), but the tradition of celebrating love with chocolate, roses, and jewelry leaves a wake of...
The Rise of Antibiotic Resistance: 3 Ways to Respond
Part I of this series outlined the three key factors that are influencing the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. This second article focuses on three ways the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has responded to this problem: Changes in Procurement:...
Antibiotic Resistance: A Threat to Global Health
According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today. I had the opportunity to speak with four experts from the UCSF School of Medicine and School of Pharmacy and all...
What’s Your Story?: 4 tips for bringing your success story to life
Inspiring real change requires more than a clever Twitter "hashtag". It requires a story that sticks and inspires. How do you achieve that? For starters, know your audience, don't be your own hero, and frame your success stories into a larger context that connect...
Three Simple Steps to Carbon Offsets
A recent post in Greenbiz.com, Why travel giant Expedia paid a premium for these carbon offsets explains, "Among the many schemes that companies and individuals use to address their personal or professional impact on generating carbon dioxide emissions, buying...
Green Campaign Ideas for the Office
Employee engagement programs and Web-based tools can increase adoption of green practices and make sustainability more visible and actionable. If you have strategic sustainability goals, the following simple tips can help align employee actions to support your...
Public Speaking: 3 Tips to Better Speeches
I think my past year of participating in Toastmasters has impacted how I evaluate a speech. After attending a recent conference, I left feeling a tad frustrated and disappointed. Before your next presentation, consider these three tips for how to make a bigger impact:...
Bending the Curve: 10 Scalable Climate Solutions
If the recent news about the U.S. pulling out from the Paris Climate Accord has you down, here is a ray of good news on the climate front. Inspired by the University of California’s pledge to become carbon neutral by 2025, more than 50 UC researchers and scholars have...
Three Tips to Reduce Hospital Food Waste
According to a report on food waste from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), getting food to our tables eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of freshwater consumed in the United States....
New Sunscreen Guide: This is Your Skin on Bad Sunscreen
June is here and that means more time to play in the sun. Just in time, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has released its 2017 Guide to Sunscreen. This year EWG scientists investigated nearly 1,500 sun safety products. Almost 75 percent of the products they...
Make Green Happen: 6 Ways to Empower Your Employees & Make Your Commitment to Sustainability Visible
Authentic engagement of employees in sustainability delivers real value, including an increase in innovative ideas, cost savings and attracting and retaining the best talent. At a recent talk at Harvard, sustainability author and strategist Andrew Winston estimated...
Engage Green Champions: Ask a Good Question
One of my favorite low-cost, yet effective, activities is to ask employees a values-based question. A values-based question allows you to engage employees to think about why environmental stewardship matters to them. From this increased awareness of what really matters, greener actions aligned from these values can be more easily encouraged.
