As resident eco-worrier in the Body&Soul office, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the environment. Not that you would think so looking at my desk. It is scattered with plastic bottles, padded envelopes and piles of paper that should have hit the recycling bin long ago. All of this is a testament to my good intentions, but in moments of crisis, when a clear desk is crucial for sanity, I’ve been known to bin the lot.

At least I’m in good company. Without wanting to implicate colleagues, let’s just say I’m not the only one giving office environments their ungreen reputation. While many of us are obediently tweaking our homes to reduce waste and cut back on energy consumption, this behaviour isn’t maintained at work. But that doesn’t let me off the hook. Aren’t I supposed to be leading the way — and taking the advice that I dish out in the Eco-worrier column? For inspiration, I turn to Martin Gibson, the director of Envirowise, a government-funded organisation that offers free consultations to companies on how to cut environmental costs. Its big message is that being green makes good business sense, helping companies to increase profits as well as creating a planet-friendly, sustainable environment.

His visit to the Body&Soul office doesn’t get off to a great start. I’m clutching a latte in a plastic cup. Not only have I accepted a plastic lid — Gibson pointedly refuses one when he accepts his own Fairtrade brew — but also I have a cardboard drinks’ sleeve around it. Completely gratuitous, I admit, mumbling something about the coffee getting cold. Gibson suggests that if I must use these extras, I should reuse them next time I nip across to the canteen.

Right, point taken. These are the kind of things many of us know we should do — and which we’re very good at in our own homes — but at work they slip down the gulf between good intention and reality.

As Gibson and I enter the office, things look up. Noting our pile of communal fruit (our duty as a health section, you know) and evidence of mugs on desks, I detect approval. “This kind of environmental practice fits with a culture of thinking long-term about health and wellbeing,” he says. “Personal environmental benefits such as having plants on desks — especially spider plants, peace lilies and chrysanthemums, which improve air quality and reduce levels of indoor pollutants — are always welcome.”

He also notes our valiant attempts at recycling paper. Peering under desks, he spots virtually no paper in our bins, since we’ve been dumping it dutifully in the large recyling wheelie bin (should I admit that I sent an e-mail to my colleagues warning them of his visit?).

Friends of the Earth estimates that 70 per cent of office waste is paper, yet only 15 per cent is recycled. Gibson suggests making it easier by having a recycling box (an empty shoebox, for instance) on every desk, so trips across the office to the bigger recycling wheelie bin would be less frequent; perhaps our recycling contractors could provide suitable boxes.

But we’ve fallen into a common trap. By focusing on what we do with our waste, we are forgetting to consider how much we use in the first place. “Recycling is the second-worst thing you can do in the waste hierarchy,” Gibson says. “At the top is eliminating the use of a resource, followed by reducing it, reusing it, recycling it and finally sending it to landfill. Since you can’t eliminate your use of paper, you should focus on how to reduce it. It’ s at this level that you save money, too.”

Easier said than done, I hasten to add. At Body&Soul, we collect unwanted paper in a tray and post it back into the printer with the printed side facing up so we can use the other side. Come press day, yelps of frustration echo round the office as rogue pieces of paper put in the wrong way scupper the system. Far better, Gibson says, to set printers to double-sided. This is a good tip but tricky to do. In our case, we’d need to install special units, which would cost between £100 and £150 each, on all our printers. But this would save 40 per cent of our paper costs.

Great in a small office, where everyone is involved with these kind of savings and will benefit financially from them. In a larger one, it’s easy to feel defeated. The most obvious ways to green up an office — installing energy-efficient heating and lighting, and updating printers so that they can double-print — are out of our hands. “The biggest difference between the home and office is the degree of control you have over your environment,” Gibson says.

“The larger the organisation, the less clear it is. You may not know where your paper comes from, how much it costs or where it can be recycled, let alone who you should approach about turning down the office thermostat.”

But finding out could lead to the discovery that there is someone on the company’s board who is responsible for the environment or that printer cartridges can be sent back to the manufacturer for recycling, as the ones from Jet Tec International can be.

Lobbying those in management positions has been made easier by websites such as envirowise.gov.uk and maximiseprofit.org.uk (run by Envirowise), which enables companies to work out exactly how much they could save. Focusing solely on cutting the carbon emissions generated in business, Envirowise’s sister programme, the Carbon Trust (thecarbontrust.co.uk) goes a step farther by dealing only with companies at management level.