How Green Is Your Office?
I’m very conscientious about reusing and recycling. I want to share some of my tips for running a environmentally responsible office. Of course, these are all things that are much easier to do in a small home-based office, but larger offices should be able to find ideas to carry into their day to day routine as well.
• Make it easy. Have a good size container right next to your garbage can for paper recycling - and use it! Ask yourself before you throw something in the garbage if it really belongs there. When you are paying bills (if you are still getting the paper version) the envelope and all inserts should go right in the recycle bin.
• When it comes to paper - reuse as much as possible. If you consistently print a lot out for proofing, reading, etc., when you are done with it and you don’t need to keep it - have a spot to put it. The next time you need to print something out for the same reason - print to the other side. You may need to experiment to see which way it feeds through your printer and may want to quickly put a highlighted line through the already used side to avoid confusion.
• If you have an overabundance of paper waiting to be reused on the other side, take some sheets, cut them in quarters and put near your home phone for message taking or use them for grocery lists, reminders, and other times you just need a little something to write on.
• Once you’ve totally exhausted all print use of the paper, decide if it has confidential information and needs to be shredded. If it does, start a pile of “clean” (nothing with messy ink, no credit cards, etc.) paper for shredding.
• After shredding, put a bag with your gift giving items to use for filler in gift bags. By putting bill inserts and other colorful paper in this pile you’ll have a nice mix of colors and textures.
• Printer cartridges - I think most office suppliers now offer a credit towards new cartridges when you bring the used one back. Now, you may sit there looking at the cartridge and thinking “this thing is so small how bad can it be for me to throw in the garbage?” Well, consider this:
55.6 percent of American consumers throw out their empty printer cartridges instead of recycling them, a Harris Interactive poll released today shows. Those cartridges add more than 40 million pounds of unnecessary waste to our nation’s landfills. The cartridges take more than 1,000 years to decompose.
(read more here)
When I recently purchased a new printer, I bought 4 cartridges each of black and color. I have a spot for the spent ones and when I put the last new one in the printer, I go off to Staples with whatever old ones I have, buy replacements and get $3 off on each new one in exchange. You can probably do this through the mail as well, I just happen to ahve a Staples less than a mile from my house (as a virtual assistant that makes me very happy.
• Have another smaller container for the non-paper recycling. I know the HP printer cartridges I use come in a recyclable plastic holder. When I do need to install a new cartridge everything but the foil type bag is recyclable. The cardboard, the inserts, and the holder.
I can already hear some people that may be serious recyclers in their home environment saying “I don’t have the time for that! My time is money!” Well, of course it is. But, it’s up to you what you do with that time and I firmly believe the trade off could be tremendous if more people took this seriously. It’s really not that time consuming, after a bit it’s second nature. There are probably other things you do that are a truer waste of your time.
Operating a holistic business is much more than what you do, it’s also about how you do it.
I know I always feel a sense of pride on garbage day when I see how little we put out and on recycling day how much is sitting at the curb.
Technorati Tags: environmentally responsible office, virtual assistant, holistic business