When we think of home working from a garden office, the first thoughts that come to mind are peace and quiet, greater flexibility and more time with the family. But there’s a much more profound environmental impact to consider too.

During the first COVID-19 lockdown last spring/summer, the Mayor of London announced that nitrogen dioxide levels had reduced by 35% in the Square Mile alone.

Working from home had a tremendously positive impact on the environment, but now that life is slowly returning to normal, what’s the ‘green value’ in remote working? And why does it make sustainable sense to have a garden office installed? Well, here are six indisputable environmental benefits of doing so.

No more commute

Commuting to work is not only a real source of stress and frustration. It’s also of grave concern for the environment.

Private transport (the daily commute) is one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases, and emissions are rising every year (2020 being the exception, of course).

Research by Monster.co.uk in 2019 found that CO2 emissions could be drastically cut by doubling the number of people prepared to work from home (from 13.4% to 26.8%).

If ever there was a reason for purchasing an outdoor office, reducing your carbon footprint has got to be a good one.

Furthermore, given the pivot to hybrid working in recent months due to the pandemic, employers are much more open to the idea.

Adding to this, in looking at conversion factors per mile of the average number of trips a commuter makes in their car, Air Quality News reckons London would save more than 420kg of CO2 per person per year. That’s a staggering amount and one that’s easy to reason with!

Heating only space you need

As anyone who worked from home this winter will tell you, their energy usage went through the roof as many had to heat their homes all day long

When you purchase a garden office as a self-contained space to work from, you benefit from more than just uninterrupted work time. You only need to heat your outdoor office rather than the entire house, and the impact can be quite considerable – both on your finances and the environment.

Less paper usage

The introduction of online collaborative platforms for remote workers, including Teams, Slack, Monday.com, and Asana, to name a few, means there’s less printing from the home outdoor office! And less printing means far fewer trees being chopped down. Even saving just one tree can remove up to 14.7 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air.

Less plastic usage

Being the boss of your own small garden office means that you can put in place whatever environmentally-friendly processes you like, including reducing plastic usage.

For a start, you won’t be tempted to buy that plastic-lidded morning coffee on your commute or that sandwich at lunch. By preparing and cooking your food at home, you’ll be surprised how much of an impact you can have.

More time to make your garden more of an eco-friendly one

By saving on that commute, you could use your time to create an eco-friendly garden. Here are a few things you can introduce, alongside an outdoor office, to help make a positive impact:

• Use recycled materials in your garden design. Think scaffolding boards and pallets turned into planters, tin baths and mangles. org is quite a treasure trove for this sort of thing.
• Get composting. Don’t let anything go to waste. Lawn clippings, vegetable peelings, tea bags, leaves, newspaper and cardboard, are all compostable.
• Conserve water. Since you’ll be at home far more and can observe your lawn and plants from your small garden office, you won’t need to rely on a timed sprinkler, which uses an awful lot of water. Instead, simply water the roots of your plants rather than the leaves at your leisure.
• Nurture eco-friendly plants. Having a purpose-built small garden office means that you’ll almost certainly develop a love of gardening. You’ll find that you have the time to be more selective in the plants that you choose that can massively help fledgling wildlife. For instance, take bees and butterflies; 97% of their habitat has been lost in the UK since WW2. A good way to encourage bees into your garden is to create a border full of wildflowers. You may even choose to plant some Beebomb seeds the same year as your garden office purchase and watch as they bloom the following summer.

 

Lower energy consumption

Being rather obsessed with gardens, here’s our favourite benefit. While we cannot speak for all garden office manufacturers, SMART Garden Offices are specified with high quality, PVCu windows and doors as standard. They are manufactured to current building regulations and include high-specification security and environmental accreditation. All the windows and doors include 28mm sealed units with Low-E glass.

The Low-E glass reflects heat to its source to make the garden office warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, thereby negating the need to crank up the thermostat or switch on a fan.

Order Your Brochure Now

Every one of 7 garden office ranges, available in 60+ sizes, is constructed from a premier grade of construction timber that is European sourced and environmentally accredited.

We manufacture all our garden rooms from our facility in Bury St Edmunds. As such, we’ve been helping clients in Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk and London make the permanent switch to remote working and couldn’t be prouder of the impact their collective decision is having on the environment.

Simply order a copy of our brochure today and you’ll be amazed by the craftsmanship that makes our garden rooms the SMART choice for the environmentally conscious home-worker.