Now, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…Once upon a time, many moons ago, excitement spread across the land. Life was never going to be the same again. Where there was chaos, there would be order; where there was mess there would be tidiness, where there were overflowing in-trays there would be a beautiful pot-plant. For this was a new era of emails and electronic documents. This was the era of…THE PAPERLESS OFFICE.
Yeah, right. Perhaps in a parallel universe this exists, along with robots doing all the housework (just like they described on Tomorrow’s World). Is it me, or are we using, and wasting, even more paper than ever before? We are certainly squandering precious energy resources, dumping more waste and overspending unnecessarily. So how can we give this story a happier ending?
Making paper from recycled pulp uses less energy and requires less bleach and chemicals than paper manufactured from virgin fibres.
Reduce your usage,
re-use and
recycle your paper and close the recycling loop by using recycled paper. This will also reduce the volume of waste going to landfill/incineration and pressure on natural habitats as demand for new timber decreases. The key environmental impacts associated with paper production and use are:
Loss of natural habitat intensive free farming
Pollution from manufacture, e.g. bleaching agents, effluent and additives
Energy usage
Waste disposal; landfill and incineration
REDUCE Register with the Fax Preference Service to stop junk faxes.
Register with the Mail Preference Service to stop junk mail
RE-USE
Always open envelopes carefully and either re-use them internally as files or for internal mail, or use labels to re-use envelopes back through the post.
Make pads out of scrap paper, for example, to use to take telephone messages, notes, etc
RECYCLE
Do not throw paper away; recycle it.
Make it easy for your staff to recycle paper, for example, put extra bins in key areas such as copier and print rooms.
In spite of the fluctuations in the paper market, paper recycling schemes are still cost-effective because they reduce waste to landfill and therefore waste disposal costs.
In small offices, the volume of waste paper may be low and it may be difficult to find a contractor willing to collect material for recycling. Storage may also be a difficult due to limited storage space. One solution is to reduce the waste at source or if you are an office in a multi-tenanted building, you should approach other tenants and landlords to create joint recycling schemes.
Labels: Save Money - Use Less Paper
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