Are you completely sure that your office is green enough?
Does it have all kinds of different recycling bins, such as bins for paper, plastics, glass and food? It has energy-saving light bulbs, too?
Well done if so, but you shouldn’t stop there!
There is a way to turn your office into a perfect Green Office. To do that, its carbon footprint has to be reduced to null by getting rid of all the paper possible.
Not only is this kind of office green, but it is also deemed an extremely work efficient environment.
Practical And Financial Benefits
Of course, changing to a paper-free system has many positive practical and financial aspects.
It’s not a secret that storage issues are actually not issues anymore. For that, we can thank storage on hard drives, discs, USB devices and servers. Thus, we are able to fill the room with some office trees, otherwise meant for filing cabinets.
There is no need to print paper and then store it in an actual administrative folder on some shelf. This frees us from paper consumption, so paper supplies are no longer needed.
Statistics from the US show that an average office worker spends around 10,000 paper sheets over a year. The actual cost of using the paper can be up to 31-times the cost of purchasing the paper. Moreover, the international financial services corporation Citigroup has made an interesting estimation – according to it, they would save $700,000 per year if all their employees saved at least one paper from getting damaged per week.
Environmental Benefits
The main goal of going Green is improving the environment and lowering carbon footprint in your office. In fact, the greenest thing you can do is to be a 100% paper-free office.
The reason is simple: the impact is much greater.
Over time, statistics have shown that cardboard products and paper take up the largest part of landfill refuse.
In 1994, the paper was 40% of total solid waste accumulated in the US, but it has decreased to only 28%, according to the EPA. Once the paper is in the landfill, it takes a significant amount of time for it to decompose (15 years). That creates a gas called methane, which is one of the most devastating greenhouse gases. Methane gas is around 21 times powerful in heat preserving than CO2.
If you go paper-free, the trees will surely like you! Why? Well, even though we can recycle unnecessary paper, some trees still need to be cut down. That is because there is still a need for a particular virgin wood pulp in paper production.
Despite people being very aware of global deforestation, its rates have risen up to 400% over the last 4 decades.
According to environmentalprofessionalsnetwork.com, around 4 billion trees are used in the paper industry. That makes 35% of worldwide harvested trees.
Needless to say, if we were to reduce paper dependency to zero in every office, the rate of tree-felling is sure to, well… fall down!
And yes, trees will absolutely love you because of it!
Dispensers For Cloth Towels
Now that you’re familiar with the benefits of going paper-free, we at Alsco can help you easily achieve it.
It has been shown that most people prefer air drying their hands to using cloth towels.
However, when it comes to continuous cloth towel, there are considerable environmental benefits.
Out of all hand drying systems, it has the lowest environmental influence. It has also been shown that, when it comes to hand drying, cloth towels are the most efficient in removing bacteria.
Hygienic hand drying is a crucial element in having your hands actually clean.
If you’re interested, Alsco’s friendly representative will be pleased to be of assistance.
Photo courtesy of Freepik Images by peoplecreations
