We were wondering how we could be part of the "green" movement. Is going "green" even makes sense for a small business? Wouldn’t it involve too much work and effort? Would it be expensive? Where should we start? We started with paper recycling- it was an obvious choice, as we were drowning under mountains of paper. We placed a file box in each office. The instruction that went along with that was: "place all your waste paper in the box". Within 2 days we had to modify our instructions since we realized that we had different types of waste paper, each with its different characteristics:
- Junk mail - went directly into our recycling boxes (as long as it did not have sensitive information - credit applications, etc.)
- Drafts - were recycled into a different box - to be used again in our printers for internal documents or more drafts.
- Old reports and documents - continued to be shredded.
- Sensitive documents with company or personal information - were shredded.
- Magazines, periodicals and news paper - after they were read or distributed among the employees they also ended up in our recycling boxes. The recycled paper is donated once a week to a local school. The school collects the paper and sells it. The money is used to buy additional supplies for the students and teacher and pay for special programs. The shredded paper is used in our packaging. We no longer use "peanuts" or other packaging materials as we produce our own now. We then started thinking of ways to REDUCE the amount of paper we were using.
These are the ways we found:
- Important documents are printed to PDF and saved on our server.
- Before printing something from the internet - we use the print preview button and choose the pages to print - if you have ever printed anything from the internet you know that what looks like 1 page is actually 3 pages. The last two pages are usually nothing but some graphics, footers, etc.
- Email - we now email all of our invoices, quotes and purchase orders. When we asked our customers if it will be ok to email them invoices instead of mailing them - they all agreed. (We only have one customer that asked us to continue mailing his invoices.)
- Fax - We connected our fax to an old computer (no expense there) and made it into our "fax server". Junk faxes? No problem - we click "delete" and they are gone. An unexpected added benefit was that now we can access all of our faxes. No one has to monitor the faxes and go distribute them. A fax is never lost. Using a simple fax program - we can recognize the text on the faxes; we can email them to other people.
Conclusion: we are saving money - We reduced the amount of new paper we buy by 70%. We used to buy 10 reams every month. A simple calculation: $50.00 a box times 12 months = $600.00. 70% of $600.00 = $420.00 a year. We are helping our community and we have less paper to file. Our filing clerk only spends about 5 hours a week filing, the rest of the time she is now able to help with the phones, and accounts receivable - we joke with her that we recycled her job too.
We are in the Technology business. We have about 30 computers that are used on the regular basis. Over the years we have collected a whole grave yard of old computers. Many years ago, it made sense to upgrade computers. Not anymore! Now-a-days it is cheaper to buy a new computer than to go through the hassle of upgrading. So we asked ourselves, how can we get rid of these computers without having a small landfill named after us? We looked around and found that less than 3 miles away from our offices is a computer recycling company. We found out that the company was willing to pay for our junk computers - they pay by the pound. We certainly did not have enough computer equipment to make any substantial amount of money. Instead we reached an agreement that has been working very well for both of us: we give them the old computers and they give us equipment. The equipment is usually pretty good and is perfect for the testing we need to do for our label software applications. I love going over there. It is like being a kid in a candy store. They have equipment that originally cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The best part - we can just pick it up and go. We have expanded our computer equipment recycling program to include all of our customers and friends, neighbors and family. We collect the old equipment and every once in a while make the trip to the recycling company and leave it there.
Over the years we have established such good relationship with the owner and his family that we are now good friends. They have become our customers. They have used our expertise in warehouse and inventory management to reorganize their warehouse, find the appropriate software for them (had to connect to QuickBooks) and help them in the implementation process. Some of the old computers we have had over the years, have been re-done and donated to local non-profit organizations, local needy families. I am just amazed by how recycling and community involvement are so tightly connected. That is one aspect of recycling I never knew about. We just love recycling, reusing and reducing.
We got excited about our success in recycling and reducing paper waste. We now started looking at more things we could do. The next thing on our agenda was cardboard boxes. We receive packages all the time. We like to keep original packaging of our expensive equipment. We had a room that was full of boxes. The regular brown boxes were usually tossed.
We took this in small steps. We started with our boxes for the expensive equipment. We decided to keep boxes of equipment that was still under warranty. That reduced the amount of boxes by about 80%. The rest of the boxes were assessed to determine if they could be reused. We ship packages ourselves. Usually we need small boxes as most of the equipment we ship is relatively small - barcode scanners, small thermal printers, rolls of labels, etc. We do not have a need for the big boxes. The ones that could not be reused were marked for recycling. We gained a room. Now as we get boxes they are either kept, reused or recycled. A small community center in our area is collecting the boxes. They sell them and using the money to pay for special programs for the kids they serve. Again, we saved money (we do not buy boxes any more and benefited our community.
