Christmas supermarket till receipts wrap around the world – every week!

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Over 26,000 miles of receipts issued as waste reaches 'epidemic' levels

British supermarkets issue over 26,000 miles of till receipts every week in the run up to Christmas – more than enough paper to go around the entire circumference of the world – and virtually all of it is wasted.

These are the findings of a leading expert in waste and recycling, which has calculated that around 270 tons of till receipts are printed out for customers, many of which are thrown straight into bins along with non-recyclable single-use carrier bags.

Most of those receipts, and everything else that is printed from the till roll, is also on a special kind of paper that does not really recycle well, if at all. It is a so-called thermal paper as the printers does not actually ink but heat to create the “imprint”. In addition to that the paper is laced with BPA, which is a known health risk.

Stores that print out additional offers along with the legally required receipt make the problem worse by producing paper that customers almost always ignore. And those are just the receipts, etc., that are issued over the run-up to Christmas.

Factor in to that the estimated 150 million supermarket and convenience store transactions every week, and a couple of feet soon turns into thousands of miles.

In extreme cases, a customer can sometimes leave a store with:

• Till receipt

• Separate bank card receipt

• Money saving offers

• "You saved… compared to our competitors" promotions

• Loyalty vouchers to collect

While the receipt itself is a (legal) requirement, it is the reams of promotional material to which we should object, leaving customers walking away with armfuls of ticker tape that they often bin, along with their carrier bags.

Those estimated 150 million weekly grocery transactions equate to:

• 26,000 miles of paper, more than enough to reach around the world's 24,000 circumference

• 270 tons of paper, most of which is discarded rather than recycled because, as indicated already above, some of the paper is mostly non-recyclable

• A year's worth of till receipts would reach from the moon and back – twice

The frightening thing is that the data is only confined this to grocery stores in the United Kingdom. Add to that other business sectors like DIY warehouses and petrol stations, add in the rest of the world – that weekly till roll is going to wrap the world up like a gift bow, and that's not a good thing.

© 2017

Waste paper at home and office

Waste paper at home and office and how to deal with it

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

We all have some at some stage and some of it is more sensitive then others. So how do you best deal with it.

You may be concerned about identity theft, or the material is otherwise sensitive or you just want to get rid of it without overfilling the trash can.

If you have any paper that is not sensitive and only printed on one side reuse it, as far as you can, by making notepads, notebooks, and such like from those pages.

I remember years ago when many companies that had their own way of printing used to turn waste paper that was printed on one side only into memo- and telephone message pads. Now, with computers and templates this makes even more sense.

Reuse is also my view as to most of the sensitive material which you shred, and that is the answer to reducing the paper stacks in our home and office.

When it comes to shredding the old style ribbon shredders are not very effective with regards to security of destroying sensitive material and therefore my advice is a cross cut shredder, ideally a fine cutting one, and then you can be, more or less, certain that the material cannot – or with great difficulties – be reconstructed.

As I keep hens that shredded paper makes great bedding (litter) for their coop and once they have finished with the stuff it goes into the composter, giving me great compost for the garden.

It kills, as they say, two birds with one stone, though I am keeping the hens out of the firing line of the stones, and no one would want to reconstruct any of the documents after the paper has been in the chicken coop for a week and especially not in the composter.

One could even use this shredded paper, I would like to suggest, for filling the equivalent of straw mattresses if one would be so inclined. In fact I am very tempted to give this a try at some stage.

Obviously, if you have neither animals that could benefit from the shredded paper as bedding or a composter and garden then the shredded paper will have to go into the waste stream, probably to recycling. But check other options before you walk that route.

So, here you have a few suggestions as to what to do with waste paper and how to deal with sensitive paperwork too.

© 2013

Things we should all do as regards to recycling paper

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Recycling is important, no doubt, but reuse is better. However, when it comes to paper, many people hesitate on what exactly to do with it. Should they throw the shiny junk mail in the trash? What about magazines, let alone books? How about paper filled with staples? These are some pretty common questions, and they shed light on the fact that paper is a huge part of our lives, perhaps more than we realize. Because of that, it deserves some much needed attention.

First, the best way to recycle paper is to, for lack of better words, not to. What do I mean with that?

The first this to do is to take as much paper out of the process as possible. To start with start you r subscriptions to magazines that you rarely read and which are of no real use to you. Instead of buying newspapers read your news online. Read books at the library or online, and only print when necessary.

Having said that, however, I am someone who does love books and also to have books at home, and I am not too great with reading too much online or even on screen. It is a proven fact that people can only concentrate on twenty or so paragraphs and that's it. After that no one takes anything in any further.

The idea is here, in not using much paper, is that if you haven't got anything to recycle that is the best form of recycling. But, we should also keep in mind that the paperless office and the paperless life is highly unlikely to ever occur.

If and when you print, try, as much as possible, to print double sided and, in order to save ink. Try to print, if it does not have to be in color and in the best print, to print only in black and in draft mode.

When it comes to the junk mail that you receive, I personally always check as to whether there is any usable paper in the envelopes and often the paper is printed only on one side. Those pages I reuse as notepaper in various forms. Other, non-gloss paper, gets shredded and used as bedding for animals. This bedding gets then, later, composted.

Shiny glossy paper can in most instances and location not be recycled and, unfortunately there is but one place for it to go; the landfill.

Also to be noted must be the fact that many paper printed with ink jet printers may cause problems for recycling in that, often, the ink is water soluble and thus can contaminate the batch for recycling.

Here is a quick list of what to recycle: envelopes, plain printer paper, colored and glossy papers, phone books and books of the like, soft cover books, magazines and catalogs, newspapers, cardboard egg cartons, corrugated cardboard, smooth cardboard, cardboard food packages, construction paper, and copy paper.

And here is a similar list of what not to recycle: food wrapping that is contaminated (or soiled), hardcover books, plastic coated papers (laminated paper, milk containers), and soft paper products like toilet paper, tissues, paper towels, napkins, and tissue paper.

Get the most out of the paper and therefore, before you send it on its way to the recycling center, consider using it for home projects, scrap paper, note taking paper, and even packaging material. Believe it or not, but pre-Hallmark and corporate Christmas, presents where simply wrapped in a light tissue paper or plain newspaper. This was a great way to reduce the production of papers as well as a great way to keep existing paper in the cycle as long as possible.

What is wrong with wrapping gifts in newspaper or other wastepaper. It is, after all, the gift that matters and not the wrapping paper. I must day that I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people insist on wasting money on something that is going to get ripped off and the tossed; I am speaking here of the wrapping paper, the so-called gift wrap.

Rethink how you use paper and use it to its full potential, and that includes the junk mail that you cannot get stopped.

Despite the many lists you can go on to stop, supposedly, junk mail arriving in your mailbox, in Britain that just does not seem to work as the Royal Mail, the official mail carrier, is the biggest culprit here as to them it is advertising revenue and they will, despite what you may ask, deliver the garbage into your mailbox.

So, always check what's in there and then reuse what can be reused and shred the rest if it is usable for animal bedding and for composting.

Waste not, want not!

© 2011

British Office Workers 'Addicted' to Paper

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

LONDON, UK, August 2010 - A survey of 1,000 U.K. office workers has found that efforts to make office paper use more efficient are proceeding sluggishly at best, wasting huge amounts of resources and stymieing IT managers' attempts to rein in energy and paper use.

The survey, conducted by research firm Loudhouse on behalf of Kyocera, found that the average employee uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year, and as many as 6,800 of those sheets are wasted.

On top of piles of unneeded print jobs, the survey found employees feeling less concerned about the environment and printing more often – a sign that 'green fatigue' is taking its toll on participation in environmental and conservation initiatives.

Only 68 percent of respondents said they were personally concerned about the environment in this year's survey, down from a high of 77 percent in 2008. Kyocera and Loudhouse have conducted this study for three of the last four years.

Despite a drop in environmental concern, 70 percent of IT managers surveyed said that their companies could do a better job encouraging workers to print smarter, largely through employee education about the cost benefits of more efficient printing.

And printing issues constitute a huge time-suck for IT managers: The average IT department spends one-third of its time on dealing with office printing, and nearly one-quarter of respondents say they spend 50 to 100 percent of their time on printing.

But IT managers also see progress happening in encouraging greener printing practices. About 40 percent said they are getting more executive support in putting green printing on the IT agenda, incorporating environmental policies into the network, and encouraging workers to print less.

A number of green printing policies are becoming more common in corporate offices, according to the workers surveyed. In-office recycling is commonplace, with 78 percent of companies encouraging paper recycling. And those ubiquitous email footers urging you to "Consider the environment before printing this message" have made their way into 55 percent of the companies surveyed.

The most common policies that have been embraced by companies are loose policies governing duplex and color versus black-and-white printing. Only 22 percent of firms have implemented password- or card-controlled printing, which allows IT or office managers to track paper and printer use on an individual basis.

As a result, there is still an inordinate amount of paper wasted by the average worker: Of the 10,000 or so pages printed per employee per year, as many as 6,800 of those sheets are thrown away or recycled. The chart below breaks down where workers are wasting the most paper.

A question of mine that this survey has not answered is as to how many of those pages where just printed on one side and could have been used again, for a variety of uses, aside from making paper aeroplanes, such as as notepaper, before finally going the recycling route.

It would seem that people just cannot think about printing double sided.

I know that it is so much easier just to hit “print” without having to go into “properties” and setting it to enable double-sided printing and many people seem to not have the few extra minutes to do that.

The full research report is available for download [PDF] from KyoceraMita.co.uk.

© 2010