I have initiated a campaign, which in my opinion is an unique effort that benefits the environment while reducing the expenses of the companies that implement it. I have prepared a presentation, which describes how to reduce stationary costs in offices. The tips deal with all aspects of office stationary like paper, printers, binding accessories and kitchen consumables.
The solution can be presented to the administrator in charge of stationary or directly to the group of employees. A disciplined approach to stationary consumption drastically saves money for the company, sometimes to the tune of 25 to 30 per cent, while its value addition for the environment is priceless.
It is important for each one of us to have a level of awareness about our contribution to the destruction of the environment and this is one of the glaring highlights of this presentation.
Some of the firms to whom this idea is presented, have already started implementing it. The savings would of course depend on many factors and cannot be quantified. But, in an ideal situation, the following example could work.
Let’s look at a company of about a 100 employees who are currently using plastic or paper cups in the kitchen.
The average number of plastic or paper cups used by each employee would be three a day, bringing the number of cups used in a year to a grand total of 750 cups, bearing in mind that an employee would work an average of 250 days in the year, excluding weekends and public holidays. Therefore, the expense of the cups for the company in a year would be around Dh9,000.
However, if each employee was provided with a ceramic mug, the total expense of doing that would be around Dh800. It would result in savings of Dh8,100 and 75,000 cups will not be dumped to the environment.
Similarly, the savings would be there in office stationary supplied, such as paper, printer cartridges, pencils and erasers, too. If purchased properly, it is estimated that around Dh15,000 could be saved in a company of 100 employees, which would usually spend about Dh60,000 a year on stationary.
— The reader is a pupil based in Dubai.
