How to acheive a green office

thriftyjo

You said your office is leased so this makes trying solar / wind generated power even more difficult. You could switch your electicity supplier to a more green/ethical one have a look at https://www.greenenergy.org.uk

Also (sounds obvious) but are you using recycled paper. We use Evolve business - it's excellent quality and buy in bulk from https://www.eco-office-supplies.co.uk so its cheaper - thats if you have somewhere to store it! They also do a cartridge recycling scheme and sell remanufactured cartridges toners etc

Back to teabags - I bought a teapot as we generally have a cuppa around the same time - so the extra money on fairtrade teabags is saved on the economy of the teapot! Although nobody has knitted a teapot cosy yet - might have to pinch a hat I have seen a nice thick one on the rack!

Savvy_Sue

thriftyjo wrote:

Back to teabags - I bought a teapot as we generally have a cuppa around the same time - so the extra money on fairtrade teabags is saved on the economy of the teapot! Although nobody has knitted a teapot cosy yet - might have to pinch a hat I have seen a nice thick one on the rack!

That would be a good idea if any two of us drank the same kind of tea ... There's Proper Tea (aka Capitalist Tea), Decaffeinated Tea (aka Communist Tea because ProperTea is Theft...), Redbush Tea, Lady Grey Tea, Earl Grey Tea, Diet Tea, Bright Mood Tea, and just about every other variety of Tea known to man (or woman, because we're all women!) :rotfl:We have five kinds of coffee as well: Real Caff, Real Decaff, Instant Caff, Instant Decaff and Instand half and half ...

I tell you, making a cuppa is not for the faint-hearted!

But I do like the Eco Kettle on the thread about an insulated kettle ... plan to get one next time the office kettle blows up! That whole thread might be of interest to small offices, as well ...

magyar

Savvy_Sue wrote:

(aka Communist Tea because ProperTea is Theft...)

Love that one, Sue.... :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

HugoSP

I run my own small business and have set up my printer to print my letter heads on normal A4 paper when I write a letter.

This saves me having to keep stocks of letter headed paper, as well as normal paper, so I only have to keep one type of paper in store.

For your company this means that when something changes, like a new partner may buy into the business, you don't have to bin all the old headed notepaper or delete the old partners name with a biro! The template can be changed on the file server, so the next letter that goes out has the correct details printed on. It also means that the letter head is always correctly positioned to the main text.

For me, I can have a number of standard formats. One for letters, one for quotes, and invoices are done via a book keeping package.

magyar

Very good point. Since my company suffers from 2000itis, (i.e. I have worked for ten companies since 1998 and barely changed desks...) I have lost count of the number of times letterheads, business cards etc. have been reprinted.

Savvy_Sue

magyar wrote:

Love that one, Sue.... :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

I cannot claim the credit: our Treasurer shared that gem with us! Hers is usually fruit herbal tea and I put the kettle on as soon as I've let her in!

Aiki_Justu_Man

We changed our printer years ago to a Xerox Phaser printer. This is not a laser. Instead of thouse huge wasteful plastic toner cartridges you load it with small blocks of wax. It melts these and sprays them onto a toner roller, which rolls it onto the paper. The quality is incredible and it is paper independent since the wax sits on the paper- so you can use cheap recycled paper rather than expensive gloss finished paper. It creates 90% less waste than a traditional laser.
We use it for printing course manuals to order and it is brilliant!

HugoSP

More ideas from my old employer.......

One initiative worked a bit like Freecycle.com does now. If someone had a load of printer cartridges for a defunct office printer, they would post them on the 'board' and offer them to other departments or employees for office use. The savings weren't huge but it generally made sense to divert unwanted items to other staff rather than just bin it.

Part of my job was to organise disposal of tooling, equipment and inventory from stores. We were trying to clear out storage space and write off/release capital for re investment (management accountants will understand). I actually set up 'Roadshows' of unwanted kit. In our case (manufactuing) such items included customised tools and test equipment that was not client owned. Quite often engineers and manufacturing team leaders of other projects would walk off with kit for their projects, and carry out minor modifications if needed at a fraction of the normal build cost of that tooling.

The value of the tooling that was put back into the company in this way, and represented pure profit, probably paid my salary alone for that year. My involvement in this area only took up about 5% of my time but I really enjoyed it. We used to 'lobby' project managers to pester their staff to have a root through and take whatever they could make use of. In some cases tooling orders worth a few £K were stopped from going out as a result of this

Unwanted office furniture and effects were sold on to employees and the money went to charity.

If there was an opportunity for a working lunch (customer visit perhaps) the leftovers were placed amongst those staff who weren't involved in that particular meeting. OK it was never much per person but the food never went to waste and it was good for morale.

Red_Fraggle_3

Sorry to ask a really silly question - I have Epsom ink jet cartridges at work which should be recycled but I can't find any where that takes them - evry web site says no Epsom cartridges - any ideas guys

gromituk

Perhaps you should be describing them as Epson cartridges?