How to Reduce Office Waste

Reducing office waste is important as they’re a big source of commercial waste. Office environments are relatively easy to control compared to other workplaces as there are few external factors (such as weather or customers). They generate mostly recyclable and recoverable materials that a strong waste management plan can help minimise.

Specific statistics about the number of offices and office workers in the UK aren’t available but up to 45% of waste is produced at work. It’s fair to assume millions of people work in hundreds of thousands of offices across the country every day. This includes offices for law firms, recruitment companies, accounting, and many other industries.

It’s important to reduce office waste and increase recycling as many such workplaces only use a general waste bin for their refuse. Lots of offices do this for convenience and because they assume it’s cheaper just to throw everything in one bin. However, recycling and reducing office waste is much more cost-efficient and better for the environment. Reduce office waste to save money too.

Reducing paper waste in the office is key as it’s one of the main materials thrown away in such an environment. It’s estimated that about 70% of office waste is paper so it should be a priority to reduce paper waste in any office. This includes printing activities, document use, packaging, and more.

Follow these tips for ways to reduce paper waste in the office:

• Go paperless – it may sound hard but going paperless (or at least cutting down significantly) is possible in an office. Create and enforce a policy to email all internal and external communications where possible to avoid physical letters and printed communications. Ban posters, post-it notes, and leaflets from the office. Get rid of paper kitchen and hand towels, straws, and other easily replaceable items.
• Store staff policies and documents online – in the modern digital world many files and documents have moved online already. Make sure you store any induction documents, contracts, and other information securely on internal systems, online, or in the cloud rather than printing off lots of documents that get looked at once and then stored away. This saves lots of paper and is often safer.
• Set printers to automatically print double-sided – plenty of documents still need printing in offices. An easy way to literally halve paper use and waste in an office is to print double-sided. Change printer settings to automatically print double-sided (and in black and white to reduce printer ink use and waste).
• Reuse envelopes – you can’t stop your office from receiving post, but you can make good use of paper envelopes. Reuse them to store any documents, as scrap paper for note-taking, or even reseal to send out any post of your own.
• Shred paper and use it to protect packaging – rather than recycling waste paper, you could shred any confidential documents in your office. If you’re sending any more delicate items to clients, use this shredded paper to help protect your deliveries rather than bubble wrap or other protective plastic packaging that’s tricky to recycle.

Look through any office bin and you’ll likely find a lot of plastic products. The average office worker throws away 156 plastic drink bottles each year. That’s not the only type of plastic waste that offices generate, as everything from printer cartridges to coffee pods soon adds up over time.

Discover how to reduce plastic waste in the office with these steps:

• Consider a cafetiere – coffee machines may produce delicious hot beverages, but they also create plastic waste with the used pods that are tricky to recycle. Switch to having cafetieres in the office kitchen with big bags of ground coffee to reduce plastic waste.
• Ban bottled water – provide glasses and/or reusable cups to encourage the use of water fountains and taps in the office rather than buying bottled water. It’s one of the main sources of plastic waste in offices so an outright ban could work.
• Use refillable printer cartridges – rather than throwing away printer ink cartridges when they’re empty, find a refillable option that fits your printers. This significantly cuts down on plastic waste and saves money compared to buying new cartridges each time.
• Buy refillable pens – avoid single-use biros and provide your office staff with branded pens that are refillable. It might not save masses of plastic given most work is probably digital but every little helps.
• Switch to sustainable suppliers – plastic packaging to protect deliveries to your office creates plenty of plastic waste. This includes bubble wrap, plastic bags, and shrink wrap. For regular suppliers choose those that use paper, card, minimal, and recyclable packaging materials.