Creating a greenbusiness.

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IntroductionChange the environment at work. Rather than “trashing” your office paper, newspaper, and cardboard, recycle it in-stead! Offices, both in govern-ment and in the private sector, generate over 10 million tons of waste paper each year.

In starting an office recycling program, a common tendency is to focus on business papers. However, newspapers and cor-rugated cardboard may com-prise a significant portion of your office waste stream and should be collected for recycling. You may also want to add glass, toner cartridges, aluminum and plastics to your office’s recycling program. Local trash haulers and recycling companies offer recycling services.

More and more businesses, large and small, are realizing that source reduction can mean a big payoff in reduced waste and costs.

Paper.Every year more than 11 million tonnes of paper and board are consumed in the UK . Much of this comes from Scandinavia. In order to satisfy our increas-ing demand for wood and pa-per products, the majority of the natural boreal forest in Scandi-navia has been converted into intensively managed secondary forest or plantations, where the inhabitants of a true and com-plex forest eco-system struggle to survive.

About 5% of Scandinavian old-growth forest remains, and yet this is still being logged. As a result, hundreds of plant and animal species are endangered. The traditional way of life of in-digenous people, such as the Saami, is also threatened and their cultural identity is in jeop-ardy.

Despite the ecological and hu-man cost of paper production we continue to throw vast amounts of this resource away after us-ing it only once, even though the capability exists to recycle much of it.

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Reduce, reuse and recycle

Yet if paper is recycled the amount of waste going to land-fill is cut and less timber is used. Managing our insatiable de-mand for timber should reduce the need to clear old growth for-ests, rich in biodiversity, which must instead be protected from commercial logging.

Despite these clear benefits of paper recycling it has been criti-cised both as a product and as a process. It has been suggested that producing recycled paper uses more energy than virgin paper production, is more pol-luting and may make a greater contribution to climate change. Such arguments have been used to promote the view that it is preferable to incinerate paper to produce energy rather than to recycle it .

This briefing examines the argu-ments surrounding the potential environmental impacts of paper recycling in relation to energy use, pollution, contribution to cli-mate change and in comparison to incineration as a waste man-agement option. Market barriers to increased recycling are ex-plored, along with waste paper recovery rates in the UK and other countries. Throughout, the term recycled paper refers to post-consumer waste i.e. paper that has been used and is then recycled.

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Ink.

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Hewlett Packard is a leading ex-ample of what it takes for a mul-tinational to embrace a closed-loop recycling system. The Silicon Valley giant’s printer car-tridge recycling programme is a case study in the challenges and rewards companies face when they take responsibility for the waste their products generate.

In 2001, HP opened its printer cartridge recycling plant in Smyr-na, Tennessee, 20 miles south-east of Nashville. The recycling programme started slowly, with prepaid envelopes tucked into packaging that allowed us-ers to post their old cartridges at no cost. A decade later, the numbers are impressive as HP increases its total plastic reuse year after year.

Cartridge recyling?

Since 2007, more than 100m lb (45.3m kg) of plastic have been recycled at the Smyrna plant. Last year alone, HP used 28.6m lb of recycled plastic in its prod-uct line. Over time, the company estimates it has kept over 511m items out of landfills, including 472m plastic bottles made into new printer cartridges.

The increased capacity pushed HP into doubling the size of its Smyrna facility in 2009 to what is now a 80,000sq ft operation. And what is occurring in this plant is as impressive as the recycling statistics. My walk through the plant witnessed not only the painstaking process by which materials are separated, but how operations manage-ment, the constant adjustment of internal returns on investment and cutting edge technology all have a role in reducing HP’s en-vironmental footprint and boost-ing its bottom line.

Each day enormous boxes and stacks of large envelopes arrive at the loading dock. Many of the boxes arrive from Staples, the office supply retailer where cus-tomers can pitch their old car-tridges. HP has long discontin-ued including single envelopes for used cartridges.

But the Smyrna plant still ac-cepts those envelopes, and, in fact, the cartridges are sepa-rated from the envelopes with a machine mimicking technol-ogy that separates corn from its husks.

Other machines on the plant’s floor appear to be more suited for assembling products instead of taking them apart. After work-ers empty the boxes and enve-lopes, a sorting machine uses laser and imaging technologies to batch them by each model. The recycling of the cartridges occurs during different shifts, one batch, one model, at a time.

Disassembly has made a huge difference in the performance of HP’s plastic recycling pro-gramme. For years, HP cartridg-es were shredded after sorting, and the results were massive piles of foam, ink and plastic all jumbled together. But now ma-chines pick apart the cartridges with an upmost precision. Ink is removed, the foam cubes are extracted out of cartridges one colour at a time and the trace amounts of valuable gold and palladium can be smelted cost effectively.

Digital.Whatever form business takes as it negotiates out of the cur-rent conundrum, it must operate within the limits of a finite world. While relatively cheap labour in the developing world may fuel growth and feed increasing rates of consumption, pressure on natural resources means manufacturing (and the econo-mies that flow from it) need to radically transform be fit for pur-pose today and in the future.

Earth Overshoot Day is the point in the year when we have al-ready consumed the amount our planet can provide for sustain-ably. In 2010 it was 21 August, and it’s getting earlier each year. Unlike the debt of a sovereign nation or bank, the debt we are accumulating with nature can-not be restructured or diluted through administration.

In the words of professor Mervyn King, Chairman of the Global Reporting Initiative: “Since the days of the industrial revolu-tion, companies have conducted business on two false assump-tions, namely that the Earth has infinite resources and has an in-finite capacity to absorb waste. In fact, the Earth has finite re-sources.

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Unnecessary printing.

Digital. In order for organisations to radically reduce waste emis-sions, they need to rethink and redesign their products and production lines, from upstream design and input sourcing to downstream product use and end of life disposal. Redesign at this scale is facilitated by the col-lective intelligence that emerges from collaboration within busi-ness ecosystems, across or-ganisational boundaries and amongst traditionally silo’ed de-partments within organisations.

“The planet is in crisis, as we have reached ecological over-shoot, which means that we have used and continue to use the natural resources of planet Earth faster than nature can re-generate them”.

The current ‘take-make-waste’ philosophy still prevalent in glob-al manufacturing is rampantly in-efficient and wasteful. More than 90% of all natural resources that go into the production of durable goods are wasted by the point of sale. This is not fit-for-purpose; it needs to change and fast. The good news is that many indus-try figures are conscious of this, with some recognising the im-mense challenge and opportu-nity this brings their businesses and the wider global economy. One well-publicised example is Unilever’s plan to double output by 2020 and halve its environ-mental impact at the same time.

The question of the moment for forward-thinking businesses, like Unilever, is how to decouple economic growth from environ-mental degradation.

Carbonfootprint.

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The past few years have seen carbon enter the boardroom agenda, with energy efficiency and targeted legislation on emis-sions turning the spotlight on the financial benefits. CEOs and the board have catalysed many significant carbon reduction pro-jects, with 93% of multinationals now addressing their own car-bon emissions in order to ex-ploit reputational and efficiency gains. This has led to compa-nies making significant progress in the measurement and report-ing of their corporate carbon footprints, with an increasing number also taking a systematic approach to prioritising carbon-reduction opportunities and set-ting appropriate targets.

But there’s a piece missing from the puzzle. While action on cor-porate carbon footprints is pro-viding tangible results in terms of cost savings, a much larger prize awaits those who take a broader view of carbon and oth-er environmental sustainability factors.

Your energy.

Carbonfootprint.

These are known as indirect, or “scope 3”, emissions. They in-clude everything from the devel-opment of a product or service through to supply chain, logis-tics, sales and distribution and customer usage. Regardless of whether these aspects of the product lifecycle are outsourced to third parties or not, they should be recognised as one of the most significant contributors to company carbon footprints. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, found that 80% of its overall carbon footprint comes from in-direct emissions and 40% of this is from consumer end use.

While some large organisations are clearly setting out their total carbon footprint, 60% of multi-national companies have yet to look at their indirect emissions – which means they are not tak-ing full responsibility for all the ways in which their products or services emit CO2.

The 40% that are addressing indirect emissions cite pressure from the board, a need to boost sales and marketing and the personal vision of the CEO as the top reasons for their actions. However, our research suggests that external drivers are likely to become increasingly influential on company plans in this area, with shareholder pressure to cut carbon increasing in importance.

The 40% that are addressing indirect emissions cite pressure from the board, a need to boost sales and marketing and the personal vision of the CEO as the top reasons for their actions. However, our research suggests that external drivers are likely to become increasingly influential on company plans in this area, with shareholder pressure to cut carbon increasing in impor-tance. This was identified by just 4% of UK respondents as a current driver, but 74% of UK re-spondents said that shareholder pressure would become a key driver for them in tackling carbon emissions in the future.

Links.www.recyclinginbusiness.co.ukwww.greenbusiness.co.ukwww.helpingtheplanet.co.ukwww.goinggreen.gov.uk