How Green is Your Office? Xerox Offers 7 Tips to Make the Workplace More Eco-Friendly
April 16, 2003 09:01:00 AM ET
ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 16, 2003--You might scrupulously recycle cans and bottles, turn the furnace down at night and keep a compost heap in your backyard. But do those earth-friendly habits follow once you walk into the workplace?
If not, it's time - particularly as the world celebrates Earth Day next week - to take some easy steps toward creating a more eco-friendly office. With well over a decade of experience in creating "waste-free products for waste-free workplaces," Xerox Corporation XRX offers seven ways that office managers and office workers can collaborate to minimize the environmental impact of everyday business activities and help protect the planet.
1. Use paper efficiently. Making two-sided prints and copies, printing multiple images per page, and printing on-demand - creating documents only in the quantity and at the time needed - prevents waste and saves energy. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates it takes 10 times more energy to manufacture a piece of paper than to create another print or copy.
2. Recycle the paper you use, and use recycled paper. Install bins in several office locations to make it easy to collect paper for recycling or for reuse as notepaper. And commit to purchasing recycled paper - it can meet the same performance specifications as non-recycled paper. Xerox offers recycled papers with up to 100 percent post-consumer content, as well as an expanding line of papers made with chlorine-free processes.
3. Reach for the ENERGY STAR(R). Upgrading old products with new, more efficient systems will save energy. For example, a large bank customer reduced annual energy consumption by 34 percent, or 1.9 million kilowatt hours, using Xerox ENERGY STAR-qualified copiers and multifunction products instead of equivalent non-ENERGY STAR products. At $0.10 per kWh, that translates to savings of nearly $200,000 a year in electricity costs. Nearly all Xerox systems are designed to meet or exceed these energy standards - and the savings add up. In 2001, Xerox calculates that its ENERGY STAR-qualified products in customer locations around the world enabled electricity savings of nearly 1 million megawatt hours.
4. Replace stand-alone office products with multifunction systems. Evaluate your work requirements; an office copier, two printers and a fax machine can consume 1070 kWh of energy each year. But if one multifunction system can handle your document needs, it uses only 800 kWh annually. Xerox studies have shown that the annual energy consumption of a Xerox Document Centre multifunction system is typically 20 percent to 30 percent less than the combined annual energy consumption of the individual ENERGY STAR copier, printer and fax products it replaces. And if the multifunction system replaces products that are not ENERGY STAR qualified, energy savings can double.
5. Return print/copy cartridges and supplies for recycling. Never throw a spent toner cartridge away; these components have multiple lives. Xerox provides customers with prepaid postage to return cartridges for reuse and recycling. In 2001, more than 7 million cartridges and toner containers were returned by customers, preventing 16 million pounds of material from possibly entering landfills. Remanufactured cartridges are built and tested to the same performance specifications as new-build products. Or, consider using solid ink printers, which eliminate cartridges altogether and generate about 95 percent less waste during use than a typical color laser printer.
6. Seek office equipment with remanufactured or recycled parts. Despite a decade of proof, there are still buyers who mistakenly believe that products with recycled-part content are not as good as those built with all-new parts. Remanufacturing printers and copiers is a practice Xerox pioneered, and involves rebuilding and upgrading returned products and parts to as-new appearance and performance. This practice kept 149 million pounds of waste from going to landfill in 2001, and energy savings from parts reuse totaled 500,000 megawatt hours - enough energy to light more than 380,000 U.S. homes for one year. Since 1991, Xerox has reused/recycled the equivalent of more than 2 million machines.
7. Use scan-to-file and scan-to-e-mail capabilities. Hardcopy documents can be easily shared electronically using scanning features and software built into office systems, such as the Document Centre family. By decreasing the need to fax or mail hardcopy documents, these features help eliminate paper inventory, save phone and postage charges, and minimize the environmental impact of delivering documents by air or ground transportation.
Xerox Corporation is committed to the protection of the environment and the health and safety of its employees, customers and neighbors. The company has received several environmental awards worldwide, and it has pioneered conservation and protective environmental policies well in advance of governmental regulations.
For more information about Xerox Environment, Health and Safety programs, visit www.xerox.com/environment.html.
NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information about Xerox, visit www.xerox.com/news. XEROX(R), The Document Company(R) and the digital X(R) are trademarks of XEROX CORPORATION. ENERGY STAR is a U.S. registered mark.
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