“I don’t spare paper. Our paper industry works perfectly well!” a heroine of the film Office Romance used to say. This attitude apparently dates back to the Soviet era, when people did not care about how long the forests, water, air, and mineral resources would last. But now, with every passing year, environmental protection and nature conservation becomes an increasingly urgent issue. The world is now consuming more natural resources than nature can renew. Ecologists say that water is restored through rains and the air gets cleaner owing to photosynthesis. But there is a limit to everything: if you emit more CO2 than trees can process, use water from underground sources that cannot be refilled, log forests that cannot grow back, this will pose a real threat to human life within a decade.
For this reason, the latest (and forced) vogue in developed countries is to save paper, gas, electricity, water, etc., at work. This gave rise to worldwide environmental movements, such as Go Green under the UN Global Treaty and Green Office. These movements also reached us a few years ago. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these projects, especially Green Office, for you will hardly find anywhere else an example of paper being used as wastefully and irrationally as in this country.
PAPER IS A MATERIAL THAT CAN BE RECYCLED UP TO 10 TIMES
It is easy to calculate how many trees it takes to provide paper for an office. Researchers say that a one-meter-high stack of paper requires one tree. Every office employee uses 0.5 kg of paper each month, and this is growing fast.
“Forests are a very important resource, for they ensure the stability of the planet’s ecosystem. The more paper is being used, the greater the demand for raw materials. We are destroying forests, thus destabilizing the ecosystem. Logging causes widespread devastation: people who live in woodlands are stripped of their natural environment and lose their culture. It is, first of all, about rainforests. This in turn creates many other, including socioeconomic, problems. To forestall this, we must try to reuse paper as much as possible. This resource can be recycled up to 10 times. To reduce demand for wood, one should use it more sparingly and reuse it. We should try to switch to electronic documents and type on both sides of a sheet. We should take a more sound approach to whether or not to type a document,” says Olena Masliukivska, senior lecturer at the Ecology Department of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. “Ukraine has a lot of paper-making factories which, incidentally, are short of raw materials. Besides, this country is an importer of recycled paper. I do not know the percentage of paper being recycled in Ukraine, but I am sure the potential is much higher. We are meeting just 5-7 percent of our recycled paper needs. It is very strange that we dispose of the used paper, while businesses have to purchase the raw material. Let me remind you there once was a Chinese woman, arguably the richest in the world, who made a fortune on recycling paper. I think this is a good signal to those who want to engage in an economically viable business.”
Experts claim the overall capacity of Ukrainian paper- and cardboard-making facilities is about one million tons a year. If fully loaded, these facilities will be able to process up to an annual 900,000 tons of scrap paper. However, owing to a poorly developed second-hand material collection system, thousands of tons of paper are dumped. At the same time, the domestic market has a considerable shortage of scrap paper, which is made up for by way of import. The past few years have seen a considerable rise in the quantity and cost of imported waste paper and cardboard. For example, according to the State Customs Service, in 2010 alone Ukraine imported almost 215,000 tons of paper and cardboard wastes, worth about 45 million dollars. The main suppliers of scrap paper to Ukraine were Russia, Poland, Hungary, Moldova, and Slovakia.
OVER 140 UKRAINIAN COMPANIES PARTICIPATE IN THE GREEN OFFICE PROGRAM
The collection of scrap paper has been gaining popularity in the past few years. In Kyiv, you can even be paid for this. Under the A-4 initiative, also in Kyiv, you can order a paper container and the office can gather used paper and hand it over, free of charge, to a paper-processing facility. But the best thing is a comprehensive approach, such as participation in the Green Office program.
The principle of the Green Office is based on three postulates: reducing (the use of water, electricity, paper, etc.); reusing and recycling; and purchasing the goods and services that do minimal harm to the environment (for example, using transport as little as possible).
In 2006-07 the Ecology Department of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy carried out, as part of the Program of Small-Scale Environmental Projects and with financial support from the British Council Ukraine, the project “Promoting Green Office Principles among Ukrainian Organizations,” one of the results of which was publication of a brochure with useful tips for those who wish to join green movements against deforestation.
Experts offered simple advice that any office can easily take. For instance, if you narrow the margins of the sheet being fed to the printer from the standard 2.5 cm to 2 cm, this will cut paper consumption by 8 percent, and if you introduce electronic paperwork, this will cut paper consumption by almost a fourth. Incidentally, experts have assessed that the cost of office equipment operation may be much higher than its price. For example, a large laser-jet photocopier that costs 20,000 hryvnias spends an average 7,500 hryvnias on electricity in seven years, and in the case of a toner it can be as much as 75,000 hryvnias. This results in 80,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
According to the newspaper Delo which has analyzed the performance of 31 green offices, Ukrainian companies are taking the following resource-saving measures: 93 percent of polled firms reuse cartridges, 87 percent collect scrap paper, 77 percent abandon business trips in favor of conferences, 58 percent share a car to get to the office, 39 percent organize transfer, the same number prefer public transport, 96 percent resort to duplex printing, the same number have introduced electronic paperwork, and 70 percent have installed water-saving flush tanks in toilets.
“We have been in the Green Office scheme for 18 months now. Our offices have collected a total 10 tons of paper, which means 153 saved trees. In financial terms, we have collected 6,000-hryvnias-worth of scrap paper and handed over this money as charity to the sponsored orphanages and boarding schools. We also gave a part of the funds we raised in the all-Ukrainian campaign ‘Save the Life of a Tree and a Child’ to the Mother and Child Health Center,” says Alevtina Beletska, spokesperson for the Foxtrot company chain, a party to the Global Treaty. “The rational use of natural resources became a pressing issue for Foxtrot offices in the summer of 2008, when the founders signed a business agreement on participation in the Go Green global campaign under the UN Global Treaty. It is the front company that initiated green actions in the Foxtrot group: they drew up a corporate scheme ‘Introducing the Green Office Environmental Program.’ The results of the efforts to minimize the office-related impact on nature are impressive. For example, in January 2010 alone the green awareness of the staff helped save 30,000 kW of electricity in comparison with the same period of the previous year. The green movement also intends to get the general public, not only shop employees, involved in large-scale collection of scrap paper. But I think our main victory is that the program is not confined to the front company’s offices and was supported by our colleagues at the group’s business projects as well as by retail outlet employees. Incidentally, this initiative has also found support among students of National Taras Shevchenko University’s Institute of Journalism, who have drawn up the Green Institute program. So now you can see scrap-paper containers at the university’s departments and halls of residence.”
A good example is a good source of inspiration. It would be nice if more Ukrainian offices “awoke and went green” – for themselves, their homeland, and their future.
