Communities This article is more than 18 years oldWorking towards a better future
This article is more than 18 years oldOn average, we can expect to spend more than 70,000 hours of our life at work. Given this investment of time, it comes as little surprise that we increasingly want our working lives to reflect the values and beliefs we hold outside of work hours.
In 2003, a survey by online recruitment agency Totaljobs.com found that 43% of jobseekers would not work for a company that did not have environmental or ethical policies. Further research in 2004 by the global accounting firm Ernst & Young showed 89% of graduates considered high ethical standards to be "imperative" when deciding whether to join a company.
Whether you work for a huge corporation or a small business, it is easy to forget that we can make meaningful contributions to the way the firm we work for operates. This can take many forms, depending on an employee's particular passion, area of knowledge or interest, or even their prejudices. For instance, you might see a colleague's bin overflowing with recyclable rubbish and feel moved to initiate a recycling programme. Or your journey to work might bring you through a noticeably deprived and run-down estate, and you might persuade your firm to become more active in the wider community, perhaps through a volunteering or mentoring programme. There are multiple ways of ensuring that your work life is as indicative of your ethical beliefs as your home life.
Employee-led initiatives really work. Much is made of the potential power wielded over businesses by external bodies - such as non governmental organisations and campaigning groups - which can help to push organisations down the path towards greater transparency and responsibility. Far less celebrated, however, is our own individual power to effect change, making our company more socially and environmentally accountable, by working from the inside out. In 2002, the Industrial Society found that 65% of businesses would change their policies if pushed by employees, which shows how much power you have.
Decreasing the corporate footprint
In contemporary business, there is considerable emphasis placed on corporate social responsibility as companies try to move on from negative associations of corporate excess. To a certain extent this could be seen as businesses growing up: those that remain "immature" - ie, corporations who are profligate with resources and continue to exploit and degrade the environment - will increasingly appear unattractive. The first people to notice that a company is irresponsible will be the employees - it stands to reason that those who try to reduce, reuse, rethink and recycle at home will be looking to follow the same principles at work.
Many companies are still spectacularly wasteful. Manufacturing, by definition, uses more resources than other sectors. It also wastes more. According to Envirowise (www.envirowise.gov.uk) - the government organisation that advises on minimising waste at work - 93% of the resources used in production - plastic moulds, coal, corrosive chemicals, etc - are never used in the final product and 80% of products are discarded after a single use. Envirowise can help you set up a dedicated waste minimisation club that will tackle issues such as cleaner design processes, reacting to legislation and the reduction of overall environmental impact.
Don't be surprised if your employer is particularly receptive to this idea; Envirowise claims that £1,000 per employee can be saved through the effective use of raw materials. The Waste Action Resource Programme (WRAP, www.wrap.co.uk) is a government-funded organisation that deals with all aspects of waste minimisation. In October 2004, WRAP launched Recycle Now, a £10m, celebrity-led campaign to encourage domestic householders to recycle. It also has a designated department to advise business and industry. If you're starting a recycling scheme from scratch, WRAP should be your first port of call.
Removing individual bins under desks and replacing them with designated recycling points around a building can significantly reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.
Take the tea break, for example; these days, the reusable mug has largely been replaced by plastic or polystyrene cups. Save A Cup (www.save-a-cup.co.uk) collects 180 million vending machine cups a year, from workplaces and schools across the UK and Remarkable Recycling ( www.remarkable.co.uk) turns them into useful stationery items to be bought back by offices, creating a market for recycled items.
The great paper chase
Of all of the materials used by UK businesses, paper is still the resource most typically taken for granted and unthinkingly squandered. UK office and printing paper (also known as graphics paper) has the lowest recycling rate of all paper grades; 86% is sent to landfill (where it adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes), or incinerated (releasing potentially toxic chemicals used in paper production into the atmosphere).
At current levels of consumption, paper production accounts for 43% of industrial forest use. Meanwhile, demand grows faster than for any other kind of wood product and worldwide consumption is predicted to double by 2020. In the UK we get through 4.8 million tonnes of printing paper every year - almost double the 2.6 million tonnes we use for newsprint over the same period. We may assume that our paper comes from a sustainable source, but as recently as June 2003 Friends of the Earth found that some of the largest and most widely used paper merchants were still importing paper from Indonesian paper mills that were supplied by timber from ancient forests.
Encourage your office not only to sign up to a scheme to recycle paper, but to use recycled paper as well, preferably from as local a source as possible. Office paper is the highest quality paper in circulation, meaning that it can be successfully recycled up to five or six times, working its way down the paper chain until it is converted into toilet or kitchen paper. The Bioregional Development Group (www.bioregional.com), an independent environmental organisation, runs The Laundry, a paper recycling scheme for central London, as well as a local, sustainable paper project for Surrey businesses. The schemes collect office paper, recycle it and sell it back to local firms.
The BioRegional initiatives provide a useful blueprint of a successful and sustainable local paper chain. A life cycle assessment on the London scheme showed the ecological footprint of Bioregional's local paper loop to be just 14% of an imported paper loop. Recycled paper, re-supplied to local business, uses less than half of the energy required to produce virgin paper, saves trees and is far preferable to either incineration or landfill.
Supporting local paper initiatives rather than buying from the huge, multinational mills that comprise the bulk of the paper trade also helps to promote smaller operations, known as "mini mills". In turn, mini mills are able to lessen the environmental impact of conventional paper production by sourcing wood from sustainably managed, smaller woodlands (also providing income for local farmers and foresters who use less industrial and more sustainable forestry techniques, such as coppicing) and using a greater variety of raw materials. For example, four million tonnes of straw goes to waste in the UK each year - straw that could be used to make your office paper.
If you can't sign up to a greener, more sustainable, supplier, you can minimise paper use in your office in a number of different ways:
- Use email instead of paper and read emails on screen. Although email presents a great opportunity to cut down on paper use, electronic mail has actually increased paper consumption by 40%, so dissuade colleagues from following up email with hard copies of documents and printing emails out.
- Collect scrap paper to make notepads.
- Adjust the margins on documents to fit more text on each page.
- Use both sides of paper, particularly when using fax machines or printers. Although we pay for a two sided product when we buy paper, how often do we use more than 50% of it? On laser printers, change the 'features' setting to print doubled sided.
- Reuse envelopes, particularly for internal mail.
Paper is not the only stationery used wastefully in offices. Opportunities to reduce, reuse, rethink and recycle lurk in every drawer. Staples, for example, are made from steel, the manufacturing of which is a resource-rich and highly polluting process. It is estimated that if each one of the UK's ten million office workers used one less staple every day, 120 tonnes of steel would be saved each year. Use reusable mini bulldog clips instead.
Green purchasing
Green purchasing is a concept that has grown in stature over the past decade. Its roots are in public services. Following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, local authorities in the UK signed up to green purchasing as part of Agenda 21 - a comprehensive plan of action to protect the environment and promote sustainable development. Since then, the procurement of green or sustainable goods and services in order to ensure high environmental and social values across supply chains has become a core part of public service purchasing. Over £1bn is now spent on green procurement for public services across the EU.
But increasingly, the corporate world has adopted green purchasing as central to corporate social responsibility charters, as company culture has been able to learn from the way public service procurement has influenced a dynamic new marketplace. If you want to shift to green purchasing, there are plenty of best-practice examples to be found in the public services. Businesses within the Thames Gateway, for example, can get the benefit from London Remade (www.londonremade.co.uk), an organisation launched by Ken Livingstone in 2002 to provide advice and entry points into the local green-purchasing network.
Wherever a company is based, establishing the best green buys for a workplace requires a similar approach to ethical purchasing at home. Before buying, or signing contracts, an ethical purchaser should:
- Ask whether their organisation needs the product/service in the first place.
- Find out whether the product has the maximum recycled or re-used content possible.
- Consider the amount of packaging used on a product.
- Consider the life cycle of a product - how long is it likely to last? If a new photocopier is an expensive model, will it save money in the long run because it is more energy efficient? Is the product easy to recycle?
- How will a product be disposed of? The Environment Agency guidelines on green procurement give paint as an example of a green purchasing decision. Because water-based paints are safer and cheaper to dispose of, they are preferable to solvent-based paints.
Green purchasing should also cover the ethical treatment of suppliers - swift payment of invoices to improve cashflow for smaller businesses for example - and fairness of contracts. For more information, visit www.sustainable-development.gov.uk.
Donations in kind
Making more ethical purchasing decisions at work is part of the equation, but not the whole picture. A large amount of corporate "waste" has the potential to contribute in a very meaningful way to society. Take toner cartridges, for example. In the UK over two million non-biodegradeable toner cartridges are thrown away every year. These could have been sent to companies such as Accutecc UK, Europe's largest cartridge refilling firm, on behalf of designated charities. They will then have been sold on to companies (perhaps through a green-purchasing scheme) with a proportion of the resale value going back to charity. As it takes 0.7 litres of oil to make a new cartridge, this also represents a serious waste of non-renewable resources. Encourage your workplace to collect spent cartridges. It just requires one person to take responsibility for collecting a number (10 is a good amount) before sending them on (many charities operate a freepost scheme). Contact an organisation such as Cartrdiges4charity.co.uk or Oxfam's LaserXchange initiative (www.oxfam.org.uk) for details.
To close the loop - and help to perpetuate a market for remanufactured printer cartridges - don't just donate, but also buy them from firms such as Officegreen.co.uk. An Office of Fair Trading study found that 78% of printer users had not switched to refilled cartridges because the manufacturer's guidelines (unsurprisingly) specified the use of new, own-brand cartridges. However, a 2002 Which? report by the Consumer's Association found that the performance difference between refilled and new branded cartridges was negligible, and that in some cases refilled cartridges came out on top.
You should also watch out for discarded products that could be donated in kind. In Kind Direct (www.inkinddirect.org) co-ordinates this type of charitable aid. Products could be seconds, samples or end-of-line stock, but because they are branded, manufacturers often send them to landfill to prevent brand names from becoming devalued. In Kind Direct brokers deals between suppliers and charities, carefully protecting brand image while enabling charities to receive new products for a fraction of the cost. In 2003, the charity redistributed more than £6 million worth of surplus, including toys, toiletries, tools, household appliances, cleaning products, office equipment, clothes, books and bedding from more than 550 companies direct to charities. And, as a result, away from landfill.
The office environment
When George Orwell was looking for a room to house his protagonist Winston Smith's worst nightmares for his novel 1984, he just imagined his old office at the BBC, Room 101. Many of us, it seems, can relate to this. Badly designed workspaces feature long, depressing corridors, isolating rooms, cramped areas and noisy open-plan spaces. A survey by Management Today found that 50% of managers would willingly exchange a week's holiday for better offices.
Clearly, many employers and employees alike would benefit from a more holistic and better-designed workspace - positive office environments can substantially boost productivity and staff retention. For tips on how to improve your work environment, take a look at www.enjoywork.com.
It is estimated that 80% of people will experience back pain lasting more than a single day at some point. The charity Back Care (www.backcare.org.uk) promotes better back care and offers advice to those already suffering from back pain. Overall, muscular skeletal disorders represent the leading cause of absence from work. More than 1.1 million people in the UK suffer from RSI (repetitive strain injury).
Prevention is obviously preferable to chasing cures, so make sure your employer provides expert health advice (such as an ergonomic expert to assess your work station) to ensure that you're not at risk. The Health and Safety Executive publishes a number of books on RSI prevention and best practice. including The Law on VDUs: an easy guide (£8.50, HSE Books, www.hsebooks.com, 2003) and Work with Display Screen Equipment (£8.95, HSE books, www.hsebooks.com, 2003), as well as a free leaflet, Aching Arms (or RSI) in Small Businesses which can be downloaded from www.hse.gov.uk.
This is an extract from Leo Hickman's book A Good Life, available from Guardian Books.
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