How to make your workplace more sustainable

There is only one planet, and the business world must do its part to protect the climate. Adopting sustainable practices in the workplace is not only good for the planet, but also for your business. A sustainable workplace can reduce your costs, increase productivity and boost your company’s reputation.

So, are you are looking at ways to make your workplace greener and more sustainable? Even the smallest of changes can have a big impact on the environment and your bottom line, so let’s take a look at 7 steps you can take today to make your office greener.

1. Change the settings on your printer driver to enable double-sided printing to use less paper. Deselect the cover sheet option and you will save an extra sheet every time you print.

2. Make sure your devices are running in energy saving mode and consider upgrading your devices to those that bear the EPA ENERGY STAR^® and EPEAT labels. Xerox's eco label products provide environmental benefits without compromising performance, quality or reliability.

3. Recycle everything from bottles and packaging in the kitchen to waste paper in the office. Also print on recycled paper or FSC-certified paper. 1 ton of new fibre paper consumes 24 trees but 1 ton of 100% recycled paper consumes 0 trees.

4. Recycle toners as part of a managed print service: when you run out of toner, we take your spent cartridges and give them a new lease of life. We clean, refill, test and send your toner either back to you or onto another organisation. Which prevents millions of supply items from entering landfills each year. You can even consolidate returns of five to 30 used supply items in a single box.

5. Implement secure printing to hold print jobs at the device until a user enters a PIN to claim them. A time-out feature deletes unclaimed jobs. This prevents forgotten prints from piling up at the device.

6. Raise employee awareness and make it a competitive challenge to help engage them and get them onboard. Make them more aware of their printing habits and help them make better printing decisions, for example with the Xerox Print Awareness Tool.

7. Use scanning to enable digital workflows and reduce reliance on paper-based processes, this will not only help you improve efficiencies but can also help support a hybrid working environment as employees will be able to access the documents they need from any location.

These are just some of the quick steps you can take to make your workplace greener and to help get you started on your sustainability journey.