The Townline Group of Companies

Welcome to the inaugural Townline Green Mail. The purpose of this email is to provide you with an introduction to our Green Office strategy that we'll be rolling out over the next few months as well as giving you a few Simple Steps that you can implement today (they're guaranteed to be easy and painfree!).

As you heard on Friday's boat cruise, it is Townline's goal to reduce our environmental footprint by at least thirty percent over the next year. To achieve this, we're "greening" the office and we need your help!

The initial Green Office strategy will revolve around The Simple Steps that all of us can do to strive for achieving sustainability within the Corporate Office.

Green Office Strategy Overview

The initial strategy will revolve around four key goals:

• Employee Engagement - we'll communicate small, easy steps that you can do to be environmentally friendly
• Paper/Waste/Energy - we'll reduce the quantity we use and increase recycling
• Office Supplies - we'll chose sustainable options in office supplies and equipment where possible
• Overall Building Structure - we'll work with Bentall to achieve sustainability within the office structure and complex

In short you'll notice over the next few months a series of changes around the office to achieve these goals. You'll be in the loop regarding these changes via regular Green Mails as well as some Green Signs scattered around the office.

This is a team effort; your input and cooperation is vital to the success of a Green Townline Office. Next week, we’ll be sending an email with information on how to contribute your ideas for a Green Office...stay tuned!

The Green Team

THIS WEEK'S SIMPLE STEP

(they're so easy we'll do two this week!)

Double side your paper when printing and photocopying

The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. If just one in four office workers made all their copies double-sided, the annual savings would equal 130 billion sheets of paper - a stack thicker than the diameter of the earth! Click here to learn how to easily make this a default on your computer and save almost 5000 sheets of paper!

Recycle your paper

Just by recycling paper, we can reduce by at least fifty percent the waste we send to the landfills. If all the offices in America did this (apologies for the lack of a Canadian example!), that would be a saving of thirty-three million tons or 561 million trees.

At Townline's Head Office, we have two Mobil Shred recycling bins. A Mobil Shred is located by the photocopier/printer next to Accounting and another is located in the Construction wing. All paper collected in these grey secure bins are shredded and recycled. For the easiest recycling (and security) option, we ask that you empty your desk recycling bin into these when it is full. We will be asking the janitorial staff to cease emptying our individual bins to ensure that all paper is removed from the office under the security of Mobil Shred. We understand the frustration when the Shredders are full and will increase the emptying schedule of these if needed.

Please also note that we're working on incorporating a on-site paper re-cycling policy/program for construction sites and sales centres and will keep you posted as to when that's in place.