The following reduction tips are designed to reduce the amount of waste in the office environment, including paper, power and productivity… yes, your office can be just as lean as your factory.

Reducing Trumps Recycling
The United States alone recycles 28 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years.

However, when it comes to conserving resources, preventing pollution and saving money in the office workplace, “reducing waste trumps recycling,” says Reduce.org. “When you avoid making garbage in the first place, you don’t have to worry about disposing waste or recycling later.”

Take office paper, for instance. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that paper and paperboard account for almost 40 percent of our garbage. According to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, the average worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. In total, almost 700 billion sheets — or 3.7 million tons — of copy paper are used annually in the U.S.

Waste reduction is more cost effective than recycling because it reduces the amount of material that needs to be collected, transported and processed. In addition to the environmental benefits, waste reduction can encourage productivity and save money for businesses and institutions of any size, according to Reduce.org. For example:

• Storage and handling — Paper is bulky to store, in boxes or in file cabinets. By using fewer sheets, you can put storage space to more productive use.

• Mailing costs — Fewer sheets mailed can mean reduced postage. A single-sided 10-page letter, sent by U.S. first class, costs more than if that same letter is copied onto both sides of the paper; it uses only five sheets and requires less in postage. The price of postage is rising, and those extra ounces can really add up.

For tips and strategies for reducing paper use in the office, check out Reduce.org. For other waste reduction tips for the office, visit INFORM, Inc.

Energy Waste
In just the U.S., office buildings consume more than 70 percent of the country’s total electricity, according to the nonprofit environmental action organization the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Recycling of printer cartridges, PCs and other office equipment has risen by almost 100 percent during the past 14 years, according to a survey by international conglomerate Kyocera.

However, due in no small part to confusion over increasingly complex environmental issues, business is becoming less environmentally responsible, says the survey, which incorporated 340 directors, purchasers and general office staff across organizations with more than 1,000 employees in the United Kingdom.

“Now an organisation [sic.] has to take into account its energy consumption, the conscientious disposal of end of life equipment, transport policies, and myriad other issues before it can claim to have an environmental policy,” Kyocera Marketing Director Tracey Rawling Church explained.

Indeed, energy conservation has become a big deal to businesses these days. Once again, this issue is not exclusive to factories that are running high-performance machines and energy-gobbling machine tools.

For one, the computer you’re using likely wastes 30 percent to 40 percent of the electrical power it consumes because it is using an inefficient power supply, according to Urs H�lzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations, and Bill Weihl, Google’s director of Energy Strategy, in a white paper last fall.

Even leaving a computer monitor turned on while you’re on a long lunch break is energy lost. Office computers use $1 billion of electricity yearly, just when idle, according to the NRDC.

Some firms now use motion sensors, which can switch lights off when unneeded in bathrooms and conference rooms, in cubicles to tell when computers are not in use and can be turned off, for instance.

And according to Investor’s Business Daily:

Cost studies have shown that daytime instead of nighttime janitorial service can cut by more than 10 percent the annual energy bill of a 100,000-square-foot office tower, as lighting and air conditioning can be shut down several hours earlier.

To learn how to use energy in your workplace more efficiently, visit the DOE’s “Your Workplace” guide.

The Lean Office
One doozy of an energy user is work itself. But there is a basic strategy you can follow for cutting down on muda (waste) in the office.

“Yes, your office can be lean just like your factory,” MainStream Consulting President Tim Hutzel recently wrote at IndustryWeek.

Under their very most rudimentary meanings, consider the following tools/concepts: takt time for pacing of tasks that must be completed; kanban for maintaining office inventory levels; and kaizen and kaizen events for continuous improvement of processes or places.

Applying lean in an office or administration environment is similar to work done on the shop floor in manufacturing. The difficulty in distinguishing between the two worlds may lie in “seeing” work in an office. Plus, there may be difficulty in defining the customer — a critical element of lean.

For more on eliminating waste in the workplace, consider the following books: William Lareau’s Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic Competitive Advantage; Don Tapping’s The Lean Office Pocket Guide; and Roger J. Kremer’s The Lean Office Pocket Handbook.

Where can you cut waste in the daily work environment?

Resources

Reduce.org

Waste Reduction Tips for the Office
INFORM, Inc.

Kyocera Research Highlights Changing Attitudes Towards the Environmental Office
July 5, 2007

Power-Hungry Offices Turning Green
by David Devoss
Investor’s Business Daily, July 5, 2007

How to Recycle Laser and Ink-Jet Printer Cartridges
by Ehow Computers Editor
Ehow.com

Tips & Tweaks: Recycle PCs, Notebooks, and Components
by Steve Bass
PCWorld.com, May 11, 2005

Recycle: Make Your Company an Office for the Environment
Office Depot

High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers
by Urs Hoelzle and Bill Weihl
Google, September 2006

When to Turn Off Personal Computers
U.S. Dept. of Energy

5 Simple Stages For Successful Lean Transformation In The Office
by Tim Hutzel
IndustryWeek, April 11, 2007

National Resources Defense Council

iSixSigma.com