Green Office

Swallow, S. (n.d.). Greening office practices: minimizing office paper waste. ecomii, Retrieved July 15, 2010 from http://www.ecomii.com/business/minimizing-paper-waste

As you're looking to decrease usage of natural capital in your daily office life, minimizing paper used plays an important role. Those reams of paper come from trees that sequester carbon dioxide, which helps to minimize the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Fewer trees mean more carbon in the atmosphere. In addition, milling, packaging, and transporting paper are all highly energy-intensive activities. For example, the Palo Alto Research Center's study shows that it takes the equivalent of 60 watt-hours of energy to produce one single sheet of paper. That's for production only - not for transporting that sheet or imprinting an image on it. The real shocker comes from the nonprofit Conservatree (www.conservatree.com): A ton of (nonrecycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees (a mix of softwood and hardwood trees standing 40 feet tall and 6 to 8 inches in diameter).

Recycling paper saves trees and uses 60 percent less energy than manufacturing paper from virgin timber. In addition, producing recycled paper causes 74 percent less air pollution and 35 percent less water pollution, and it creates five times the number of jobs as producing virgin paper does.

Reduce....Then Recycle

Despite the benefits of recycling paper, make reducing your paper use your true goal. Why? Because recycling paper is still energy intensive. Whether you establish a company-wide goal or ask each department for a reduction goal depends on your company size and organizational culture.

To help identify your opportunities for reducing paper waste, ask for three to five specific paper-reduction strategies from each department of the company so you can investigate the ideas for potential. After all, most managers know intuitively where the majority of their paper usage is concentrated. If HR still runs paper paychecks, this department may submit "converting to electronic checks" as one of its ideas. Likewise, marketing may have long considered changing up its advertising mix to focus more on an online presence and less on largely ineffective, paper-wasting mass mailers.

Simple Steps

Want to get the ball rolling without waiting for the feedback of various departments? Try implementing some of these simple ways to decrease the amount of paper generated in your office:

• Edit documents on your PC rather than on hard copies. This is an easy and efficient way to save paper. In fact, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
  
• Take paper that has been printed on one side and convert it to note pads. By doing so, you get two lives out of one piece of paper. If printing hard copies is absolutely necessary, you can also print drafts of documents on the back sides of printed paper. When you're done with the draft, recycle it instead of trashing it.
  
• Require 1/2-margins on all documents. This move can save up to one page for every three pages printed. Pretty impressive for a couple clicks of a mouse! The easiest way to make this change is to adjust the defaults to Narrow if you're using Microsoft Word. Doing so sets margins to a 1/2 inch on the top, bottom, left, and right portions of the page. In other programs, look for the screen to set margins in and choose Custom. The view may take a bit to get used to because there's more text on the page, but after a month, you'll feel like your documents have always looked this way.
  
• Print on both sides of the paper. Double-sided printing is a no-brainer and deserves to be a mandatory policy in your office. Review your printer's manual to make sure it can automatically handle duplex printing (a fancy term for double-sided). Alternatively, you can check out the print dialog area in word-processing documents. Click the Properties menu, review the options, and scan for Duplex Printing or Two-Sided Printing. If you see either term, then your printer is configured to handle automatic duplex printing. (Note: If you have several printers, you need to check out each one individually to assess its automatic double-sided copying potential. However, if your printer also functions as a copier and is capable of double-sided copying, you're probably good to go for automatic duplexing.)
  
  If your printer isn't equipped for automatic duplexing, you'll have to do your double-sided printing manually - meaning you first send a print job and print the odd-numbered pages Then you flip those pages over and print the even-numbered pages. To do this, go to the print dialog box and check Manual Duplex. It may take a few practice sessions to figure out how to pull the paper out and flip it so that the second page is right side up on the back of the first page. After you've figured it out for your printer, post a note nearby so that everyone in your office can easily see how to manually print double-sided.
  
• Invest in green printing software. Some printers are now being bundled with green printing software called GreenPrint. This program neatly identifies and eliminates unnecessary pages (like those containing only a legal disclaimer, URL address, or Web banners) and converts files automatically to PDF format for easy document sharing. It also tracks the number of pages and associated costs so you can capture the savings and toot your own green horn. The average savings per user is about $90 and 1,400 pieces of paper annually. You can check out the details at www.printgreener.com.