The Cupertino Courier

City urges businesses to limit waste of paper

By Pam Marino

The county's Solid Waste Commission is going begging at Cupertino's mid-sized and small companies. The plea: use less paper.

Cupertino, like all cities in the state, must reduce the amount of waste it sends to the local landfills by 50 percent by the year 2000. If it can't do it, the city could face fines of up to $10,000 per day.

So far the city has successfully reduced what comes from its homes by approximately 56 percent, since the state started keeping track in 1989. But the steady stream of commercial waste has kept Cupertino's overall figure at 37 percent.

The Solid Waste Commission estimates that 60 percent of the county's waste stream comes from businesses, more than 900,000 tons each year. Offices use nearly 1.5 pounds of paper per person each day. The average office worker throws away a half-pound of paper each day; an employee at a financial institution throws away two.

"To walk in and change the behavior of a business is not a small thing," said Cupertino's Pam Ledesma, who is in charge of the city's recycling and waste reduction programs.

Ledesma has worked with the county on the new "Paper Less...It's Better for Business" campaign, which seeks to educate mid-size to small companies on how to use less paper. The point, Ledesma said, is not recycling, but "source reduction." In other words, not using paper in the first place.

"We're not worried about the big companies," Ledesma said. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard have the resources to hire staff and promote campaigns among employees to use less paper and recycle. But smaller companies, especially those that use lots of paper--such as law offices, title companies and accounting firms--may need some help and education, Ledesma said. The goal is to convince smaller firms that using less paper not only helps the environment but saves money, too.

"They don't realize how much money they can save," Ledesma said.

County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who chairs the Solid Waste Commission, also recently urged businesses to look at the bottom line.

"Despite the widespread use of electronic media, paper remains an essential supply for business," Simitian said. "But paper waste hurts the bottom line. Businesses must pay for that wasted paper, to print it, copy it, file it, mail it and dispose of it. Efficient paper use can cut costs significantly."

The county is focusing on source reduction, Ledesma said, because there is no overall structure in place to efficiently collect recyclable items from businesses.

Besides, Ledesma said, recycling, while laudable, is still expensive in more ways than one. It not only costs money to recycle the paper, it also costs the environment in energy for trucks and the recycling process itself.

"It's much more intelligent to just not use the paper in the first place," Ledesma said.

The city is currently studying how to reduce commercial waste. Ledesma said a consultant is "literally looking into trash bins to see what's inside," so the city can come up with a plan.

In the meantime, the county is urging businesses to do simple things like make two-sided copies, use scrap paper in faxes and printers for drafts, make scratch pads from used paper and provide a paper-recycling bin separate from garbage bins.

Other ideas include reviewing documents on screen and printing only when final versions are complete, extending margins and using compact fonts to produce fewer pages of text and reusing boxes for storage.

For more information about how to participate in the PaperLess campaign, call the Countywide Recycling Hotline at 1-800-533-8414.

[ Back to Contents Page | Cupertino Courier Home Page | Archives ]