Save Money – Use Less Paper

We see 10 Times more Information on Screen then on Paper

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Save Money – Use Less Paper By Lilach Bullock

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

Only print and photocopy where necessary.

Photocopy and print double-sided (make this the default setting).

Always do a single trial copy before doing a big batch. Use spell checkers and other facilities.

Print drafts, internal documents and photocopy on paper that has only been used on one side. To stop either the printer or photocopier from jamming, store the paper to be re-used near the machine under a heavy weight so that all the paper is at a similar humidity and temperature level.

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.

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