Today, the local council for which I work has declared a climate emergency. There is already a lot of cynicism out there in social media world about the declaration but I am glad. It’s a long awaited commitment and yes, it won’t be perfect but it gives us a clear mandate.
This is a hill I’m prepared to die on so I am very interested to see the actions that will come from this move. I know this is going to be in the library’s strategy documents because it was signalled to managers yesterday, so I’m already thinking about specifics in my particular branch.
What can we do? This is a brain dump post so may be repetitive and less than logical or comprehensive. Feel free to suggest other stuff. I fully own that I need to do more research and this post is simplistic.
Reduce the amount of paper we use:
We print receipts all over the place - for items going into transit to another branch, for slips for books on hold, for due dates. We’ve got to reduce those in some way.
We print lists of so many things - items to be put into transit for holds, items to be assessed for withdrawal. The LMS we use does have a mobile app that could possibly be used for this kind of work. If we invested in RFID wands that could also help and could also help us to be more efficient in locating items quicker.
Our buildings:
Some of what goes on in our buildings in terms of efficiency is out of control for my team. Our HVAC is a perpetual issue for us. Facilities are working on improving it, so that could help reduce the power use but it’s not something my team has much control over. However, we are a bit slack about turning things off at the end of the day so that can easily change. Facilities recently changed most of our lighting to LEDs which are more efficient. Hmm what else?
Recycling:
We could do a lot more in this area. We already recycle bottles, cans, some plastics. We re-use paper for scrap. We do craft recycling activities.
We separate our food scraps for composting. I don’t fully trust that this gets taken to an appropriate place though. We are reliant on all recycling stuff going to the right place. Ideally I would like it if we can reduce waste as much as we can.
Stuff we consume a lot of:
Pens
Toner/paper
Tapes like sellotape, book mending tape
Information:
How can we support the community to address this issue for themselves? Can we provide good information about choices for things like electric vehicles, housing efficiency, alternative energy sources? We already lend out kits for people to find out how efficient their homes are.
Questions:
Could we do some kind of community garden thing in the outside areas? How much work would my staff have to do though?
Could we do a worm farm here?
Should we mend more things rather than taking them out of circulation?
Some things we do could be more digital but will that remove choice for people who fall through the digital abyss? What does this do for the 40% of NZers who are functionally illiterate?
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