As time passes, modern society grows in awareness of the little blue dot that everyone lives in. Now, more than ever, the individual man or woman to the multinational corporations have taken steps towards a more sustainable and greener future.
You and your company, no matter how big or how small, can do your part too. By simply recycling waste cardboard, paper, and other office supplies, you will contribute to the worldwide effort in preserving the environment.
Understand Waste Habits
Recycling can be easy to implement and develop into a workplace system and policy, as long as you know where to start. With this, you can begin by researching into your office’s waste habits and outputs.
How much waste do you make in a week, a month and a year?
What can you recycle from all that waste? Once you do recycle, how will it impact your workplace, or in other words, what benefits will you gain from recycling?
Look at the Big Picture
Others may reach this step and think that recycle will only be a waste of company time, resources, and manpower. You can think deeper, however. Do you know that recycling can actually lead to a cleaner office, which, in turn, leads to a large boost in productivity?
Recycling can reduce the clutter in your office, resulting in fewer sources of allergens and germs. You can then have healthier employees, and healthy workers mean more work done!
Reduce Document Waste
As you can see, recycling can be immensely beneficial to your company. Now, you can truly start to recycle. First, identify your main waste product in the office, which would likely be waste paper. Subsequently, you can take action to reduce your waste output.
With regards to documents, you can set all your printers to duplex printing to half the amount of paper your company consumes. You can also reuse documents with prints only on one side. Finally, once you have used both sides of documents, and you no longer need them, you can hand it over to recycling services here in the U.K.
Search for Other Recyclables
Once you have reduced your used paper output and sent what waste you have produced to recyclers, you can focus on other items in your office. Plastics from disposable bottles and cups, and printer ink cartridges or toners can be your next focus point.
You can set up bins in your office to collect all the plastics. You can eliminate personal bins, while you are at it, to centralise waste collection. Once you have collected enough to fill your bins, you can send your plastics off next to the recyclers.
Share Your Vision with Employees
You can follow the same protocol with other recyclables in your office, but then you also have to address your employees. You can set up seminars or meetings, where employees can learn the importance of recycling, helping the environment, and workplace cleanliness and productivity.
Unity in recycling will mean the success of the green changes you introduce.
Once you have all your employees on board and plans to pursue more sustainable company practices, you can cut down your company’s waste and help keep the environment healthy. You will also have more attentive and alert workers, with all the garbage gone. Everyone wins!
