An eco-friendly environment promotes green living that helps to preserve energy and reduce air, water and noise pollution. It’s a blessing for the environment and also greatly improves human health. Living green is becoming more and more important and valued these days. It’s a myth that making your office or home eco-friendly means higher costs, in fact, it helps save money by reducing our use of natural resources and helping our priceless environment.
When you practice your business more sustainably, you’ll see why being good to the environment is also good for the bottom line. Studies have shown that people enjoy working for environmentally friendly organisations and they’re more likely to stay at a company that implements these sustainable practices. So armed with an eco-friendly attitude, where do you start?
Use recycled paper and recycle used paper – Recycling paper fibre saves trees, energy, water and chemicals. Keep a paper and cardboard recycling bin at each desk to make it easy to collect used paper. Now you can also choose recycled paper that has been certified to sustainable forest management standards.
Duplex printing – printing both sides of a page is one of the best ways to reduce paper use. Many printers provide automatic double-sided printing. And some multifunction printers allow you to scan both sides of a page at once for fast double-sided copying.
Go paperless – You can distribute soft copies using email, dropbox, google drive, or one drive instead of as hard copies, when practical.
Conserve toner and ink – Use draft and toner-saving modes for prints that don’t require high-quality output, such as email or rough drafts. Save high-resolution colour for prints that matter most, such as presentations and customer-facing materials.
Return printer supplies for recycling – Recycling programs have kept millions of used toner bottles and cartridges out of landfills. Many manufacturers even offer prepaid shipping labels to return empty toner cartridges. Your local officeworks will likely have their own ink cartridge recycling station – give them a ring!
Take advantage of exchange offers – Replace your old devices for saving on a new and updated energy-saving, high-efficiency devices, appliances and gadgets, for example, the multifunctional printer. Instead of buying several individual scanners or printers, you can buy one product that can print, copy, scan and fax. It’ll help you save money by purchasing supplies for only one device instead of several. Plus, you’ll cut energy cost, which you would have used for all those separate devices. Of course, be careful how you dispose of the old ones! Printers and copiers can be donated to others who need them, or they can also be recycled.
Choose energy-saving products – Save money on energy bills by choosing Energy Saving products. Many products can “learn” your workgroup’s usage patterns and automatically adjust between power saving and ready modes to help conserve energy.
Buy in bulk – Buying your office supplies in bulk saves on the per-unit cost and reduces waste due to less packaging. Always try to look for the words “high efficiency” or “high capacity” to lower your per-unit cost.
This should give you a great start on how to make your office more environmentally friendly. Please share which of these have worked for you, or if you have any extra tips for others, in the comment section below.