Why Should We Recycle Office Waste Paper?
It doesn't matter if you roll out of bed and barefoot it over to your PC to start you workday, or if you work outside of the home, you can help save forests by making better choices about your paper use practices. As unbelievable as it may seem in a time where more and more people and businesses are going green, old-growth trees are still being clear-cut for paper products.

According to current estimates, American businesses generate enough paper every day to circle the earth more than 40 times, that's about one and a half pounds of waste paper per employee each day. And yet some 77% of office waste paper is recyclable. Making new paper from office waste paper uses 30% to 55% less energy than making paper from trees and reduces related green house gas and Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions by as much as 95%.

Every ton of waste paper recycled can typically save almost 7-8 cubic yards of landfill space. More than 40% of waste going to the landfill is made up of commercial and office paper waste. Eliminating this by recycling office waste paper could nearly double the longevity of current landfills. According to the EPA estimates recycling one ton of paper also spares the lives of 17 mature trees, saves 7,000 gallons of water, 2 barrels of oil, and 4,100 kilowatt hours of electricity, that's enough to heat, power, and provide water for the average U.S. household for five months.

When Walpole a City in Massachusetts recently set a goal to increase it's total tonnage of recycled material to over 2000 tons in fiscal year 2008, city officials immediately realized the easiest place to start was with paper products. Said a city official, "We want people and businesses to recycle as much paper as they can. It's not just printer and other office papers, or newspapers, but corrugated boxes, file folders, envelopes, ledger papers, even spiral notebooks."

Yet despite such statistics and efforts by cities and towns nationwide, an astonishing number of business have yet to initiate a paper-recycling program. And that's a shame, according to Ron Novas, Executive VP of Miami Waste Paper, a paper recycling firm. Says Ron, "implementing a paper and cardboard recycling program is really quite simple, and an effective program not only can pay for itself, it can become a revenue stream for a business." Andrea Asch, manager of natural resources for Ben & Jerry's would have to agree with Novas, she says, "While eliminating waste at the source is a nice incentive, our recycling program brings in almost $100,000 annually."