Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event held every October 15th where bloggers unite to post about specific issues affecting us all (some more directly than others). Since its creation in 2007, topics have included the environment, poverty and this year brings us to climate change.We thought you might be interested to know what preventative measures we take to combat it.
The Problem
Please forgive us for this, but in the past we were guilty of throwing away approximately 2,000 cubic litres of cardboard per week; supplier shipping cartons were routinely dumped without a moment's thought. There had to be a better way to deal with this excess waste, surely? Around this time it just so happened that we were working towards our ISO accreditations, one of which was the 14001 Environmental Management Standard. In a nutshell, the aim was to minimise the negative effect our operations have on the environment.
The Solution
By investing in an industrial cardboard shredder, we were able to shred waste cardboard for use as packing outgoing orders which eliminated the need for the void fill we were previously using, and took our cardboard waste to practically zero. Tech support evangelist and quality manager Mike explains "With a relatively small investment in the cardboard shredder, the company has made an almost 100% reduction in the amount of cardboard we dumped. In addition, we no longer purchase polystyrene void fill chips that clearly have a negative impact on the environment". We also strive to reuse as many boxes as we can for shipping goods out to customers.
Whilst our contribution may only seem minimal, you have to look at the long term impact. We estimated that over a five year period, we would have dumped a collosal 500,000 cubic litres of good clean cardboard.
So, are you participating in Blog Action Day? If not, are you taking any measures to prevent climate change? Please let us know in the comments.