How can confidential shredding reduce your company's carbon footprint?
If your business needs to go green then reducing its carbon footprint will be a big part of that. Every business generates paper – lots of it – and the way that you deal with the waste paper that your company creates will have a significant impact on the kind of carbon footprint that you end up with. Confidential shredding is a process that is designed to make document destruction more secure and also more efficient, reducing the impact your business makes on the environment in the process.
Local recycling reduces carbon footprint
Shredding on-site handles all your paper recycling needs locally without any effort on your part. Documents are disposed of in the required bins and then shredded before leaving the premises. After that they are taken to a local centre to be recycled. So, the carbon footprint generated by the entire recycling process is significantly smaller than it would be if the business was moving its own recycling and taking it further afield. There are opportunities to make the business more efficient in performance terms too – recycling and disposal becomes the responsibility of a shredding partner, freeing up staff to add value elsewhere.
Partnering with a shredding service means shared resources
Being part of a group of clients using a shredding service enables resources to be shared so that less energy is wasted achieving the same result. Shredding trucks collect paper waste from a wide range of clients in the same area, using just one journey to pick up from multiple clients, as opposed to each client separately transporting their own waste. Plus, shredding trucks are designed to be environmentally friendly and have been designed with features to reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
Minimising what you send to landfill
Recycling paper means that it doesn’t end up in landfill but can instead be turned into something useful – in fact, the standard piece of A4 paper can be recycled anywhere between five and seven times. It’s often tempting simply to dispose of your unwanted documents in what seems like the simplest way – dumping it in landfill. But if your company needs to improve its green credentials then on-site shredding is a much more environmentally friendly option. It will also ensure that your data security is improved and that documents that could reveal sensitive or confidential information are safely disposed of.
Saving energy
There are many ways in which using a shredding service can help your business to save energy, including reducing the fuel that is used just getting unwanted documents to a recycling plant. Recycling paper can save up to 7,000 gallons of water per tonne of paper as the process of creating recycled paper is much more energy efficient than new fresh paper stocks. In fact, recycling just a single tonne of paper could save enough energy to power the average home for six months.
There are many good reasons to partner with an on-site shredding service if you’re keen to reduce your company’s carbon footprint. If you’d like to find out more get in touch with the Shred-on-Site team today by calling 0800 181 4106.
Author: Mark Coombes, Follow me on Google+
