Unnecessary paper waste

S

Sumatra

Guest
With pending pay by weight refuse charges I'm starting to realise the kilos of unnecessary paper waste produced and received in this office.

I have only come to appreciate this because with the pending introduction of the user pays philosophy out here I have had to quantify the waste produced and also find ways of reducing and disposing of it. Not a bad thing.

On one hand we need to reduce office waste and on the other through regulation, we seem to have become trapped as irresponsible generators of such waste.

Anyone else been successful in reducing office waste? Any ideas?
 
One simple thing (where documents *must* be printed) is to use duplexing and multiple-up settings when printing.

Duplexing is just printing on both sides of the page - some printers support it, some don't.

Multiple-up is printing 2 (or 4 if the text is clear and someone won't have to read the entire document in one go) pages per side.

If you print 2-up and duplex you get 4 pages of writing per sheet of paper and can reduce your paper consumption by up to 75%. Print 4-up and duplex and you can save up to 7/8ths of your consumption. 4-up can be a bit hard on the eyes, but for a document which only requires occasional review or a big manual that you read parts of once and then file away on top of a cabinet somewhere it is grand.

The savings really only become apparent when printing large volumes of paper. If your print runs are normally 1 or 2 pages then you don't save any paper at all.

z
 
Agree with Zag

Also do the same with copying where possible

Will also reduce the amount of space required to store paper records ( seven years & all that )

Also reduces the amount of paper to be destroyed after the seven years is up

We have been doing this for a couple of years now. Filing cabinets are starting to show the benefit of it.
 
just on a aside

a lot of companies that need to store records are now scanning directly from the photocopier to a pc, saves the need of storing documents onsite

just to give an example if an office was in the IFSC or somewhere with High cost per foot rent they can save on document storage costs onsite, saving money that can be negated against the bin costs

check out the options here www.digidox.ie
 
reducing paper

I don't send fax cover sheets as they waste 1 page on this side and 1 page on the other side. People I send faxes to are generally expecting them anyway. I try to get people who fax me documents to email them instead but some don't seem so keen, even though my fax machine has been known to "lose" faxes from its memory before printing
 
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