A few years ago the carbon footprint was all anyone was talking about. But in recent years it’s become more about being ‘green’, and how you can reduce the impact your company has on the environment by making small changes – and your carbon footprint is a big part of that. One of the ways your business can start to move towards being green is looking at how you handle paper, and more importantly how you destroy it.
Shredding Policies
Shredding policies have now become commonplace in business. The destruction of documentation was initially more of a concern for businesses dealing with large amounts of confidential data, as this was the best way to keep it safe and protected. But hunching over an office shredder is a time consuming and frustrating task, not to mention if the machine breaks down it could result in your documentation not being destroyed, breaching the Data Protection Act. Instead, any documentation that has finished being useful should be destroyed and recycled at local plants where possible, minimising the amount of waste you send to landfill and reducing the carbon footprint of the paper by recycling locally. Recycling the paper you are finished using means that bit can be broken down and made into new paper. A standard sheet of A4 paper can be recycled between 5 and 7 times, and for every tonne of paper recycled 17 trees can be saved.
How A Shredding Company Can Help You Be Green?
Many specialist shredding company’s services (including ours) have been designed to help you reduce your carbon footprint and do business in a more sustainable way. Rather than requiring you to use your own shredders and transport the paper to a recycling plant yourself, a shredding company will bring a truck to your offices and shred the paper on site before moving on to another client to destroy their documents. The truck will move around the various locations in your area until full, when it will then take all of the paper to a recycling plant in one load, saving petrol and reducing the carbon footprint of the paper. Each truck is designed to securely store and shred your documentation on site, rather than taking it away to shred at another location, and then moving on to another location for recycling.
The shredding trucks used are designed to be environmentally friendly, with features and improvements brought in to reduce fuel consumption and emissions for driving the truck and operating the shredding element. Local outlets will often arrange a series of shredding stops in one area before delivering on the same day, lowering consumption again. We recycle 100% of the paper we shred and comply completely with the environmental management system ISO 14001. Simply by ensuring that your waste paper is being shredded and recycled properly (as all shredding companies will do) you are saving 17 trees per A4 sheet, not to mention 7,000 gallons of water per tonne of paper and 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space. You could also save enough energy by recycling one tonne of paper to power the average UK home for 6 months. In a business setting, 1 tonne of paper can pile up before you know it, and throwing it all in land fill seems like a very attractive option if you don’t know what to do with it. Next time, try using an outsourced shredding company and see how much easier and greener the process can be.
Using an outsourced, local shredding company not only saves you time and money (no more hunching over the office shredder on a Friday afternoon), but it helps your company to protect the environment, reduce your carbon footprint and shredding costs. If you are interested in using an outsourced shredding service like ours, get in touch today.
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