Greening BAVC

BAVC has always valued energy conservation and the preservation of our natural environment. In 2007, however, BAVC made an organizational commitment to becoming a green business. While the City of San Francisco has yet to establish “green guidelines” for non-profit and/or media organizations like ours, we implemented some initial changes on our own including:

reducing our use of paper products by distributing most of our supplementary training materials and forms as PDF or other electronic documents; eliminating paper membership cards and materials; using HTML email invitations for events and screenings; moving to electronic timesheets; and copying double-sided if needed;

purchasing only recycled-content paper and business products;

cleaning with non-toxic, environmentally-safe products;

using efficient lighting systems to save energy;

conserving energy with the installation of more efficient heating and air-conditioning system and programming; and the installation of honeycomb shades to prevent external heat and cold in several of our suites and offices; and

upgrading our network and software to be able to control all of our labs from a single computer, thus making it easier for us to power down computers and other energy-sucking peripherals when not in use.

Of course, at BAVC, we still have some “greening” to do and we continue working towards our additional goals including:

the conservation of water with low-flow toilets and faucet aerators; switching from bottled water to filtered tap water; and

paperless invoicing and financial processing.