Did you ever think that doing little things to be more environmentally 'friendly' might also mean that a project like The Clearing House can save hundreds of thousands of dollars while reducing its impact on the environment? Before you imagine us in our hand-woven jumpers and leather sandals read on.

The Clearing House project receives its funding from a variety of sources and is committed to investing wisely in the project while reducing its potential environmental impact. In the process the project is saving costs.

Let's work it out. Here is a rough list of what The Clearing House does to reduce its negative environmental impact:

1. We agree to have a 'virtual office' - no petrol to drive to it, no fumes, no oil

2. We agree not to print out reams of paper every week - no dead trees, no packaging, no printer toners to dispose of, no unnecessary use of electricity

3. We agree not to buy extra shelving, filing cabinets and rubbish bins required to hold all that paper - no materials for furniture, factories to build them, workers driving to the factory, no pollution from ships and trucks to deliver furniture

4. We agree to turn our computers off after use - no unnecessary use of electricity

5. We agree to use email, then a phone, then face to face in that order and where appropriate - no unnecessary use of electricity, less pollution for cars or flights.

6. We agree to use shared, modern servers where possible - better conservation of space and power

Sure we still have to save our files on a memory stick or send it to a server somewhere but we know the impact on the environment is far less than if we did things the 'old school' way. But what about cost savings? What does it save The Clearing House in terms of dollars? A very conservative estimate of saved costs per year might look like this:

1. Fuel and oil savings for non-travel of staff and governance group members = $ 25,000

2. Savings on no office lease, furniture, electricity, cleaning, security, etc = $ 55,000

3. Paper and office consumables, shelving, filing cabinets = $ 15,000

4. Electricity savings while practising efficient use of computers and workstations = $ 25,000

5. Communications used efficiently = $ 10,000

6. No ownership of old servers with redundant space, obsolete power efficiency, security, software, IT staff who drive there to watch it, etc = $ 50,000

That's a rough total so far of $ 180,000 and that is just the start.

Do you have some other great ideas about how community projects like this one can reduce their environmental impact while saving costs? Tell us here and the best ideas will go onto our homepage.