The Endpoint: Wasting paper costs money

Paper tigers

17 November 2008 00:00  [Source: ICB]

Recycling may begin at home, but annoying other people about recycling begins at the office. Of course, it can be a two-way street

ONE THING that routinely drives me bonkers is when I visit the photocopy room at the office and find blank sheets of paper in the waste paper basket.

Nothing has been printed on these sheets toner has not touched them at all. The precise technical details are vague to me, but sometimes the computer formats a page differently from how you see it on the screen, especially if you are printing something from the internet.

When you send the document to the printer, an extra page gets sent through, landing hot with the other pages. It has happened to all of us, I'm sure.

But some lazybones would rather throw out a perfectly good sheet of paper than go through the tremendously grueling labor of opening up the copier (oh, my back), returning the blank sheet to the cradle (yikes, I fractured a tibia!), and then shutting the paper tray (arrrgh, I shattered my femur!)

Because the trash can contains only the nonessential pages of yesterday's football round-up - along with that blank piece of paper - these folks can obviously differentiate between the nonessential pages that get printed and the essentials.

But they obviously cannot differentiate between a piece of paper that is trash and one that can be used again.

And then there are those days when someone sends a spreadsheet through, and the Canon or Hewlett-Packard has to print the overflow on additional pages.

But there are plenty of pages where the spreadsheet has not overflowed, so these are blank. When this happens, I have seen about 20 blank pages tossed in the waste basket together.

Just because the sheet has passed through the copier does not mean it now has the plague and must be destroyed. If it is blank, put it back in the machine and use it until it's not blank.

If I knew kung fu or could bench-press 500lbs, I might do more about this, other than gripe. But what I'd really like to do is try to understand the lazy, selfish thought process that goes on behind such flagrant waste.

Some out there might be now saying, so what? It's only a piece of paper. People at my company do it all the time.

Well, sir, that attitude is costing your company money. What, you think paper grows on trees?

By: Ivan Lerner
+1 713 525 2653

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