Every step you take towards a more sustainable office is important, but there’s always more you can do to make an impact on your local community and our society as a whole.
As an office worker, you may have already switched over to sustainable paper and found that sustainable paper usage is not only helpful for the environment, but also cost-effective. You may wonder if there are even more ways to save money, and the planet, through paper usage in your office space.
There are many ways to go beyond sustainable paper and reap the benefits. To determine these options, let’s examine five ways to be sustainable through paper usage alone.
5 Ways to Be Sustainable Through Paper Usage
1. Print Efficiently
Only print what you need. It’s easy to be careless and print a new copy to replace every mistake without realizing you’re going through an entire ream of paper. Print more efficiently by proofreading. Even if you are a paper person, you should be mindful of your paper usage, ensuring that you only print out what’s necessary or what’s been thoroughly revised.
2. Use a Planner to Schedule and Share with Your Team
For those times when reprinting is unavoidable, encourage your team to recycle the scrap paper. Use them for note taking purposes, or shred the paper and use it as packing material. For those workplaces that utilize fax machines, use scrap paper for printing receipts. Incentivize your team to reduce their paper waste and avoid using paper irresponsibly.
3. Organize Your Workspace
Declutter your workspace. By decluttering your office, you can organize your materials, making it less likely that you will need to reprint them. By doing this, you can save time, money, and paper resources as well.
Clutter can be harmful to your well-being and difficult to manage, leading to careless decisions such as reprinting things and making unnecessary lists. Choosing to declutter your space and reduce paper usage are significant steps in improving your organization’s efficiency.
4. Print on Both Sides
While many companies will simply purchase sustainable paper, thinking this is enough, printing on both sides of your paper, or choosing to reuse paper to print on the other side later, is a great way to expand upon your sustainability as an office.
Even doing this with half of the paper you consume is sure to make a world of difference in the long run.
5. Set up Direct Deposit
By setting up direct deposit as an office manager, you are sure to decrease a large amount of your company’s paper usage over time. Although a check may not seem like a ton of paper at first glance, imagine your entire team’s checks and multiply that by how many they receive in a year.
Setting up direct deposit as a company is simple. All it takes is a manual direct deposit program and your staff’s bank information. This one act could save hundreds of sheets of paper a year.
There are countless ways to be more sustainable in the workplace, this list is just scratching at the surface. Business professionals have a responsibility to be a part of the solution rather than the problem, and this includes making a difference through sustainability efforts. Hopefully, these tips will help you and your office be the change you want to see in the world. All that’s left is to get started.