Throughout the 90s and 00s (up to 2011 when I started my own business), those years working in offices were very much paper-based, and we couldn’t have lived without it as a resource to help us do our jobs.

In the legal and medical industries, where it’s important that everything be recorded meticulously, the volumes of paper used in our offices were vast. Fast-forward to the last 5-10 years, these industries, and many others, have made a change to using much less paper, or even going almost totally paperless.

I was shocked to note that the UK paper recycling rate is low on the scale when compared to the combined European average (82.5% as of 2021).

Sources: data.gov.uk and Eurostat

DS Smith, one of the UK’s top paper recyclers, in their recent Wasted Paper report state:

“Since an 85% peak in 2017, the recycling rate for paper and cardboard packaging has been falling and if the decline continues, we could end up recycling just 77% by 2030, with increased consumption and waste volume forecast.”

These statistics spell out the potential growth and continued reliance on harvesting timber forests, and growing need for incineration of paper waste and increase in volume of landfill, all of which are devastating to the environment.

I am proud to be part of an industry where we are practically paperless, and we continue to audit ourselves regularly to identify areas where we can reduce our use of paper and packaging materials.

In order to make a positive step to put something back into the environment, Outsource Typing support Ecologi, and to date have helped them to plant 112 trees across many different projects in Africa, which is not only helping the environment through carbon sequestration and regeneration of biodiversity in the natural world, but it is also helping feed and sustain people. We hope to continue to do so for as long as we can – please consider doing so too. They have a wide range of projects you can get involved with and lots of different ways to help.

Whether it be big moves such as starting to record your own carbon data, supporting global projects, to simply recycling your household and general business waste, please be active in any way you can to protect and preserve our planet.

 

Further reading:

UN Sustainable Development Goal 12

What is a circular economy?

How to bring your business into the circular economy