Video: Fight to Green Business

Greening business is an essential task to reduce waste. According to our friends at Lets Green this City in San Francisco each office employee wastes 770g of high grade paper, which could otherwise be recycled, every day.

The number of people in employment for the three months to November 2007 was 29.36 million in the UK. If we also wasted 770g each per day, we would as a nation be wasting 22 600 tonnes of paper a day, or about 385 000 trees a day.

Paper can easily be recycled and offers a high revenue payment per tonne recycled, if your business is yet to start recyling waste paper, this simple change could reduce costs and increase revenue.

Some Paper Facts (Source: GreenPrint)

• 1 ton of paper = 400 reams = 200,000 sheets
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets
• Average cost of monochrome printed page .67 pence
• Average UK office worker prints 38 pages per day, which is at 232 working days per annum is 8,816
• Average of 29% of which is wasteful printing creates 2,556 pages per year of unnecessary paper waste
• For every user in your organisation, based on these findings, in printing terms alone generates 61.34 KG CO2 requiring 142 kWh of energy to be consumed to supply the paper
• Printer Ink is one of the most expensive liquids to purchase. To fill an Olympic sized swimming pool with ink would cost around £11.8 billion
• One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources
• The Pulp and Paper industry is one of the more destructive and energy consuming industries in the modernised world
• One tonne of paper uses over 19,000 gallons of water
• In order for us to consume our fair share of the world's wood resources we would need to reduce our consumption by 73%.
• The UK is the fifth highest consumer of paper and board in the world.
• On average, each of us consumes 198 kg of paper and board per year.
• London offices churn out three and a quarter million tonnes of office and printing paper a year.
• The US conservation pressure group Conservatree has calculated that on average one ton of uncoated non-recycled printing and office paper uses 24 trees.
• Paper accounts for 42% of industrial forest use.