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  • 05 June 2012 2:26 PM | Anonymous member
    An AusLSA Webinar recorded on 5 June 2012 featuring presentations from:
    • Stephen Reardon, ECO-BUY, and
    • Luke Chamberlain, The Wilderness Society
    on the environmental impacts of paper production and how to reduce those impacts. 

  • 01 January 2012 1:27 PM | Anonymous member
    The Wilderness Society - Ethical Paper Pledge

    Join the 800+ companies and organisations that have pledged not to purchase Reflex Paper until Australian Paper stops sourcing from our native forest
      

    Lawyers for Forests Eco Kit The aim of the “Forest-Friendly” Eco-Kit (the Kit) is to detail some easy, cheap and effective ways for your firm to reduce the impact it has on our environment and, in particular, our native forest resources.
      
    The Paper Facts White Paper The purpose of this white paper is to introduce Fuji Xerox Australia  employees, customers and other stakeholders to the issues  surrounding paper and its environmental impacts. This paper  reviews environmental issues in the pulp and paper industry, seeks to  understand why stakeholders raise these issues and how the industry  is responding. It provides balanced and objective insight into paper’s  environmental impacts so that informed procurement decisions can  be more easily made.
       

    WWF Guide to Buying Paper

    Check your Paper

    Paper Company Environmental Index

    The guide and the accompanying WWF paper tools – Check Your Paper and the Paper Company Environmental Index – are designed to help paper purchasers to source responsibly produced paper products and to reduce their environmental footprint
  • 10 October 2011 12:00 AM | Anonymous member

    Cost to implement

    Minimal if current printer fleet is capable of doing duplex printing.

    Cost savings

    At Norton Rose, changing to duplex printing as a default led to a reduction in paper consumption of 30 – 40%. This equates to a cost saving of approx $100,000.

    Reduced waste, particularly confidential waste

    Environmental impact/savings

    Reduced paper consumption, reduced waste production, reduced electricity consumption

    Implementation Issues

    Behavioural change, acceptance.

    Ideas to promote reduced printing

    • Change the default settings for all staff to double-sided printing. Make it easy for staff to choose single-sided for when it is deemed necessary, but don’t allow staff to change their own default settings – Norton Rose, Swaab, Maddocks
    • Changing the ‘quick print’ settings to double-sided
    • Change the firm style guide to include double-sided printing. You can also reduce font-sizes and margins. Auditing of compliance to the style guide ensures compliance – Maddocks
    • Rationalising the number and location of printers. Requiring people to walk further to collect printing seems to reduce the volume of printing – DLA Piper 
    • Providing larger computer screens, or dual computer screens making it easier to read documents whilst in electronic form – Maddocks and DLA Piper
    • Provide 2 and 4-up per page - Norton Rose
    • Firm-wide tracking of quantities printed by each individual. A league table can be published to shame heavy printers (Net Balance) or discussions can be held with heavy consumers (Maddocks)
    • ‘Follow-me’ delays printing until an individual’s pin or keycard is used to release it, it also means people can collect their printing from any of the networked printers. This reduces the forgotten print and the superseded print. At Maddocks ‘Follow-me’ is offered not mandatory. At Swaabs, follow me was not accepted as there is a short delay at the printer.
    • ‘Equitrac’ can send small print jobs to a local printer and larger jobs to a MFP where it is prepared (collated, bound, hole-punched) – McCullough Robertson
    • Sorting trays at printer stations to collect each person’s/team’s printing for collection -Swaabs
    • Electronic delivery of scanned images to the user – Maddocks
    • Education and awareness raising campaigns. At Maddocks a ‘Wipe-off 5 campaign’ to get staff reduce printing by 5% resulted in a 10% reduction.
    • Changing the firm policy to electronic filing/storage of documents as opposed to hard copy. It has been found that electronic storage results in much easier search and retrieval of documents. It also greatly reduces the burden on staff tasked with filing hard-copy documents providing them with additional capacity to provide alternative assistance - Maddock

    Hints to promote acceptance of changing to default duplex printing

    • Obtain a resolution from executive/management to introduce default duplex printing and direct those who resist to that resolution – Norton Rose
    • Explain that clients are demanding duplex printing and reduced printing – Norton Rose
    • Explain the costs savings – Norton Rose
    • Explain the reduced clutter and storage requirements – Norton Rose
    • Avoid the environmental arguments and focus on costs savings, etc... – Norton Rose
    • Describe it is a short-term trial (eg 3 months) and ask people to delay commenting until the end of the trial. At DLA Piper, this has resulted in almost 100% acceptance
    • Where there is not a management directive to change to default, staff can still be encouraged to use duplex printing through awareness raising and empowering people to use it by providing instructions on how to do it – DLA Piper (London)
    • Calculate the impact, particularly the costs savings and distribute to all staff – Norton Rose
    • Telling the traditional lawyers who were unaccustomed to looking on the backs of documents they have been looking at the back-sides of pages in books all their lives –Norton Rose
    • To those who justify single-sided printing with court procedures, remind them that nearly all Australian jurisdictions now permit filing double-sided documents – AusLSA is commencing a project looking at court procedure to see if we can bring any pressure on jurisdictions where filing double-sided documents is not the norm

    Impact of introducing default duplex printing

    • Duplex printing, as a default, can reduce paper consumption by 30 – 40%. At Norton Rose, this equates to approx $100,000 per annum
    • The Printer fleet review at DLA Piper resulted in a savings of $72,000 per annum from reduced paper usage (>20,000 reams of paper per year) and 33% reduction in electricity consumption
  • 02 September 2011 2:17 PM | Anonymous member

    Download as PDF

    Issues

    • The scope of 'stationery' should include paper based consumables (writing, printing, copying, notepads, folder inserts etc), toner cartridges and ink, writing implements and general office accessories
       
    • Stationery suppliers will typically have vast supply chains, and will acquire products from many sources; the challenge for the end consumer is to try as much as possible to ensure that the products we ultimately use are sourced ethically, and provide environmental relief in their manufacture
       
    • Stationery supply is a highly competitive market, technologies are converging and environmental performance in manufacture or supply is being seen as a differentiation factor
       
    • Our purchases need to consider how the supply is sourced, as well as how to minimise impacts from use and disposal of product 

    Considerations

    Identify Requirement 

    • Consider the specifications of the stationery and consumables used in your office against the criteria stated in the UNEP procurement guidelines (below). These are classified into four criteria, being:
      • paper and paper based consumables;
      • toner, inks and printer cartridges;
      • writing implements

    Plan

     

    • Consider how you want to decide on a stationery supplier. The UNEP guidelines provide a checklist with a scoring mechanism, but ultimately, it may be more of a commercial decision for your firm, which may be based on price or relationship, however you should always consider the environmental and ethical sourcing issues before you reach a final decision. 

    Select

    • Selection of a stationery supplier should be made after you have satisfied their ability conform to the majority of the issues identified by the UNEP procurement guidelines.
       
    • It will be very difficult to prove to yourself that the supplier does meet this conformity and it is unlikely that you will have the resources to perform independent auditing yourself. In this instance you should seek assurance from the supplier (as a minimum in the form of a self-assessment) in the following areas:
      • that production of the 'product' conforms to international labour standards and where possible this is independently verified;
      • that the supplier has a written corporate environment policy;
      • that the supplier has a environmental management system in place;
      • that the supplier recognises the environmental impact of their freight and has a program in place to mitigate the CO2 through transportation of products;
      • that the supplier has a return and disposal program (for items such as toner or ink cartridges and perhaps packaging). 

    Further Information 

    Prepared by Kelvin O'Connor,
    Henry Davis York

    Henry Davis Yorlk
  • 23 December 2010 2:06 PM | Anonymous member

    Cost to implement

    $ Nil (the printer fleet replacement was under contract)

    Cost savings

    $72,000 p.a. (in paper usage)

    Environmental impact/savings

    7.9 tonnes of CO2per year

    Over 20,000 reams of paper per year

    33% reduction in electricity consumption

    Implementation Issues

    Staff engagement, procurement


    Overview

    By upgrading your firm's printer and multi-functional device fleet, you can not only save paper and energy, but also reduce your firm's electricity bills by a significant amount.

    Programme details

    In late 2008, DLA Piper undertook a complete review of its printer and multi-functional device (MFD) fleet. The purpose of the review was to identify opportunities for:

    • Device rationalisation
    • Reduction in document production costs
    • Improvements in efficiency through the use of imaging, OCR and workflow tools
    • Improvements in environmental efficiency through reductions in power consumption, use of paper manufactured from sustainable resources and the introduction of duplex printing as the default on all end user printer / MFD devices.

    In the lead up to the fleet replacement, the firm's print habits and volumes were monitored and benchmarked to identify areas for improvement and to 'right size' the new fleet. This review was undertaken with the assistance of consulting firm Fulton Francis.

    In mid 2009, DLA Piper undertook a complete replacement of its floor printer / MFD fleet and a partial replacement of its print room fleet. As part of this exercise almost all 'personal' laser printers were removed from the fleet and staff switched to using shared devices.

    Post upgrade - Trends in Paper Consumption

    Prior to the upgrade, the firm moved to the use of 100% recycled paper stock but later, as part of the fleet upgrade, changed to FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) certified virgin paper as this was believed to be a more environmentally friendly alternative to 100% recycled. The main problem with 100% recycled stock being that it is not possible to know how the original source paper was manufactured. Currently the firm is trialling Natures Paper, which is manufactured wholly from wheat pulp.

    Duplex Printing- currently 61.9% of all print jobs are now printed in duplex mode. The rest is printed either in simplex mode or 2 up / 4 up. The number of sheets of paper saved per month through the use of duplex printing currently averages 879,000 (1,758 reams). This equates to an annual saving in paper cost of $72,000.

    Trees Saved- an average of 105 trees are saved per month as a result of the wide use of duplex printing (based on an average yield of 8,333 sheets of paper per tree, source information Conservatree). 1,260 trees a year are saved based on these calculations. From this we can estimate the carbon sequestered by these trees annually, according to guidelines provided by EnergyStar. Based on an average of 700 trees per acre 1,260 trees would take up 1.8 acres. An acre of trees will store 4.4 tonnes of CO2 per year. 1.8 acres is equivalent to 7.9 tonnes of CO2 per year.

    Device Rationalisation and Energy Efficiency

    Prior to the fleet replacement, the energy consumption of the legacy fleet was measured over a 2 week period and extrapolated for benchmark purposes. CO2emissions per page of output were calculated to be 13.91 tonnes per 1,000,000 pages printed / copied. At that time, the firm was producing roughly 35,000,000 prints / copies per year.

    The new printer / MFD fleet uses Ricoh's @Remote system to measure power consumption of all devices under various modes of operation. These figures were used to calculate the CO2 emissions per page of output on the firm's new fleet. The new emissions levels were calculated to be 8.46 tonnes per 1,000,000 prints / copies, a saving of 5.45 tonnes of CO2 per month or 39.2%.

    Extrapolated further, this is a saving of 65.4 tonnes of CO2 per year. To sequester the same amount of CO2 would take 14.8 acres of trees. As a further benefit of the improvements in fleet efficiency the firm has realised a saving in electricity consumption of 33%.

    More information

    Mark Hornsby, Corporate Services Director, DLA Piper

     

      


  • 30 September 2010 2:34 PM | Anonymous member

    Maddocks: Wipe-Off 5 (Printing Reductions)

    Cost to implement

    Minimal: purchasing fridge magnets and printing and laminating posters

     

    Cost savings

    Using 5 - 10% less paper, actual cost depends on size of firm and procurement.

     

    Environmental impact/savings

    2.5 reams of paper per staff member per year (which does not just mean less trees, but also less water, electricity and emissions related to paper production)

     

    Implementation Issues

    Communication, staff engagement

    Download as PDF

    Overview

    The "Wipe off 5" programme is designed to encourage all staff to reduce their daily printing by 5 pages.

    Programme details

    To implement the programme, the Maddocks Environment Committee:
    • Provided all staff with a fridge magnet which stated "think before you print!"
    • Placed A3 laminated posters stating "Wipe off 5" in all print rooms.These had different pictures on each side, which were turned over regularly.
    • Sent staff an email at the beginning of the programme with the following message:
    Can you Wipe Off 5? Maddocks' #1 enviro-target for 2007 is to wipe off 5% from our total paper consumption by December. 5 pages per person per day - that's all it takes to make a HUGE difference to the environment. Can you wipe off 5? It's easy - some ideas are attached, so why not take up the challenge and wipe off 5.
    • Tips for reducing printing included "think before you print", using double sided printing (or double-double printing) and getting WP or administrative assistants to send a link to the document when they've finished typing, rather than printing, if you think you might make further amendments.

    What were the results?

    • Maddocks' staff exceeded the initiative's expectations and reduced their paper consumption by 10 pages per day, which represents a saving of 885,896 pages per year for the firm.
    • As Maddcks uses recycled paper, it is difficult to calculate the exact benefits of this initiative, but if the firm used non-recycled paper, this saving is equivalent to 117 trees, or 1,770 reams ofpaper.

    Prepared by
    Shirley Hamel
    Director of Knowledge and Business Services
    Maddocks

     

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