Many of the smaller businesses I have worked with over the years have struggled to get office paper recycled as they just don't produce enough waste to make a collection service worthwhile - a catch 22 position for a company wanting to improve its environmental performance.

Well, this week I have been talking to stationery supplier Office Team who will collect your white and coloured paper for £1 a sack when they make their deliveries. The waste paper goes back into the very paper mill that produces their eco-team brand of recycled paper, so if you buy that you could very well be using the same fibres you sent them previously.

Not only is this a genuinely closed loop, but it also maximises the use of the delivery vehicles as 'waste' collection vehicles are not required to pick up the paper, so it is a very efficient use of transport to boot. They also use reuseable/recyclable packing which they take back.

This is an excellent example of how a business is using the environmental agenda to find competitive advantage over the rest of the sector. And a great solution for office based companies to boot.

Labels: green business, paper, supply chain

This is the latest of a series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:

Use overhead projectors and powerpoint at meetings to present data rather than handouts. Make the presentations available on-line instead using an intranet or similar.

Another tip next Monday.

Labels: paper, tips, waste minimisation

This is the seventh in a new series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:

Save paper by discouraging epic reports. You don’t need a War and Peace-sized document to organise the coffee rota. There may be other benefits to your business too - Proctor & Gamble have famously used a one page memo format for decades and see it as a key factor in their business success.

Another tip next Monday!

Labels: one page memo, paper, proctor gamble, tips

This is the fourth in a new series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:

It's always intrigued me that in offices we have a general waste bin by our desks and a recycling bin typically at the end of the corridor. Why not put a paper recycling bin by each desk and a general waste bin further away? Your used paper collection will soar as a result.

Another tip next Monday!

Labels: paper, recycling, tips

Despite having spent ten years working in the environment and sustainability field, the sheer volume of our consumption of natural resources still has the capacity to leave me speechless. And it happened again yesterday as I read the Sundays. The Observer had a piece on the world's consumption of printer paper - 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide of which 45% is binned within the day - a cool trillion pages of unwanted e-mails, cover sheets, drafts, accidental prints etc. Of course the economic cost of this is not just disposal, but the whole cost of ordering, purchase cost, storage, distribution, loading the printer, maintaining the printer (more printing = more wear & tear), emptying the bins and then finally disposal.

Some solutions to this are easy - use 2-sided (duplex) printing, don't print cover sheets (you should really know what paper is yours) and don't print e-mails unless there is a commercial/legal imperative etc. I also find, provided your eyesight is OK, drafts and some large documents can be printed 2 pages to each side of A4 - so you get 4 'pages' to one piece of paper. The main difficulty I have is I still like to scribble over draft reports with a red pen, so I now try to restrict myself to printing a draft every other time I get the urge to!

In the wider organisation, information, directories etc can be stored on an intranet, inessential handouts can be banned from meetings and individual departments can be given paper/printing cost reduction targets.

Unfortunately, despite this, we seem further from the 'paperless office' than where we were 32 years ago when the term was coined.

Labels: paper, printing, waste, waste minimisation