Sustainable living

While this is a pretty extreme example of sustainable living, there are many ways to make buildings — both homes and commercial buildings — easier on the environment. Not everyone is going to want to build an "earthship," but there are ways to reduce your carbon footprint by making your home or office building more energy efficient and using earth-friendly materials to build!

For instance, many sustainable living communities utilize things such as earth-friendly insulation and building materials, ENERGY STAR energy-efficient appliances, and solar panels to reduce a home's impact on the environment as much as possible. These communities may also offer things such as parks, walking trails, neighborhood shops within walking distance, and locations on local bus routes to encourage more walking and less driving, therefore reducing the pollution released into the atmosphere from cars.

Sustainable living — and, yes, "sustainable working" in the form of earth-friendly office buildings — is becoming much more popular now, and as a result there are many options for educating yourself on the subject. There is plenty of information online and in recently published books, if you have the patience to do your research and weed through all of the information to find what you need. However, you may also choose to take LEED courses, which instructs you in the principles of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

These courses may be helpful for you, whether you are looking for career training or just the information you need to do or oversee the work yourself. Schools such as Everblue Training Institute take pains to offer courses for a variety of purposes: to help you attain LEED accreditation, to train your employees, or even just to give you the knowledge and tools you need to make your own home or office building more environmentally friendly.