How much solid waste is your company contributing to the landfill each year? You might be surprised.

According to the EPA, Americans generated 250 million tons of solid waste in 2008. This huge trash pile is dominated by paper and paperboard products (31.0%) and plastic (12.0%) – the backbone of American business.

Since your company is undoubtedly contributing to the pile, doesn’t it make good sense to consider ways to reduce this solid waste? In addition to conserving natural resources and energy and freeing up landfill space, reducing solid waste is also a great way for a business to save money by reducing the amount it spends on supplies.

At the same time, trimming the amount of trash your business generates can be a way to create a “green” reputation as an environmentally conscious company.

How can you get started? In general, the three-legged stool of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is a great guideline. To reduce the amount of waste your company generates, consider purchasing less, and thus discarding less. For example, a paper use reduction program can help your company reduce its document production costs, while contributing less waste to the landfill.

One way to reduce paper consumption is through a technical analysis of how your organization creates, shares and retrieves documents – document management. By leveraging digital-only documents and more effectively managing which documents are printed, your company can see measurable savings in both paper costs and the amount of solid waste it generates.

The second leg of the stool, reuse, harkens back to Depression-era living, when products were cleaned or repaired for reuse.

The third leg of the stool, recycling, provides significant cost savings. For example, many businesses prefer to buy remanufactured toner cartridges as a way of reducing the amount of plastic that goes to the landfill while reducing the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.

According to The Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse, the process involved in remanufacturing toner cartridges saves approximately 2.5 kg of CO2 per toner cartridge. Over the two decades LaserCycle USA has been remanufacturing toner cartridges, we’ve kept three million pounds of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.

Using remanufactured cartridges reduces solid waste in other ways, too, including keeping four pounds of plastic out of the landfill and saving three quarts of oil per cartridge. These cartridges are 97% recyclable and also conserve natural resources by eliminating the need for virgin materials used to make new cartridges.

LaserCycle USA can help your company develop a plan to reduce solid waste, by incorporating paper use reduction and the use of remanufactured toner cartridges. We also have a Paper Offset Program to neutralize customers’ paper usage by planting trees in local forest fire burn areas and also those forests affected by pine beetle kill. And, we honor customers for their recycling accomplishments, including the amount of plastic kept out of landfills as a result of using recycled laser printer cartridges.

To learn more about how LaserCycle USA can help your company achieve its sustainability objectives, call us at (303) 666-7776 to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation.