Seven Ways to Create a Green Office

Through Vision 2021, the UAE supports the proliferation of clean energy and “green” growth plans. The UAE was ranked seventh in 2018 globally for having the highest carbon dioxide emissions. Cities like Dubai are working towards reducing carbon footprint by 2050, especially since the city was titled as the ‘World’s Most Improbable Green City’ by the National Geographic in 2017.

At Xerox, we are dedicated to helping governments and organisations to achieve their sustainability goals. Our commitment to sustainability includes helping them find ways to work smarter and faster while improving their business operations and the environment. Here are simple ways to make any organisational operations, public or private, more efficient and sustainable.

1. Use a print driver that makes sustainable printing easy. Adjust your print driver default settings to print on both sides of the sheet. This process is also known as duplexing. Deselect the cover sheet, and you’ll avoid printing a page unnecessarily. To let others know it’s your print, select the watermark option and you can place your initials or some other identifier on the sheet in a conspicuous fashion.
2. Select energy-efficient printers and multifunction printers that bear the EPA Energy Star and EPEAT labels. Print multiple images per page and print only the quantity you need at the time you need it. Print on paper certified to sustainable forestry standards or use paper with recycled content. Set draft modes and toner-saving modes for prints that don’t require high-quality output.
3. Choose innovative printing technologies. Some toners offer sharp image quality, exceptional reliability and low total cost of ownership. It reduces the amount of toner needed for printing a page and requires lower fuser temperature. That means reduced electricity consumption and CO2 emissions compared to conventional toner.
4. Recycle office paper, and print on recycled papers or FSC certified paper. So many trees are cut every year to create paper or paper-based products. According to the University of Indiana, “Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!” Also, recycling will reduce your company’s disposal costs significantly.
5. Automate your workflow as much as possible. By turning manual, paper-based processes into efficient, digital ones, you’ll save paper, time and money and reduce the number of errors. For example, you can use the scanning feature to enable digital workflows. Alternatively, you could start managing your print services by assessing and optimising; securing, integrating, automating, and simplifying our processes. Managed Print Services (MPS) enables you to digitise document processes to grow revenue, reduce costs by as much as 30 per cent and operate more efficiently.
6. Educate your employees about the impacts of their printing habits. You can engage your employees in fun, competitive ways. There are tools on the market that will help you do just that. The tool raises employees’ awareness about the environment and communicates office “news” using the customizable posting feature.
7. Implement secure printing to hold print jobs at the device. Until a user enters a PIN to claim a printout, the document will not be printed. A time-out feature deletes unclaimed jobs. This prevents forgotten prints from piling up at the device and enables employees to cancel print orders should they change their mind about printing a file.

While governments are proactively working towards their sustainability objectives and enterprises are following their lead. Once you become an eco-friendly brand, you will notice how your behaviours affect the environment. Having sustainability become part of your company’s DNA will bring the world closer to reducing carbon footprint while helping you to cut down on workflow costs.