Home Office

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The majority of concerns affecting a personal office at home are similar to those for the rest of the house: turn things off when not in use; buy recycled, second-hand or sustainably produced goods; reduce packaging and waste. Living & Lounging is probably the best place for general furniture comments, or try looking under the Office, Commercial and Industrial section.

Did you known: A PC left running 24 hours per day creates 720kg of CO_² a year? Leaving a monitor on overnight wastes enough energy to laser print 800 A4 pages and leaving a printer on overnight is about as bad.

Try not to print stuff out, but aim to be a paperless home office. When you do print, use recycled paper. Using scrap paper to print is a bit risky as it may jam, and printing on both sides is not an option on most affordable printers, but if you’re dedicated you can manually turn paper over to print on the back. Instead of buying notepads, why not use the back of waste paper?

PCs apparently take 10 times their weight in fuel to make, so try and make them last. Replace them when you actually need an upgrade, rather than just fancy a change. Also, think about buying second-hand stuff, as there is a lot of nearly new kit out there for sale by reputable traders. For instance, everything you are reading here on Ecoboom was written on a second-hand PC bought off Ebay.

Junk mail can create a lot of waste and be a pain, so get yourself taken off the ‘bombard them at will’ list and block that junk using the Mail Preference Service. It is illegal to send junk faxes to individuals, but businesses are fair game. If you have a business registered to your home office, you can block junk business faxes by registering with the Fax Preference Service. I bet you can guess what the Telephone Preference Service does.

Laser printers are probably the best option for quality, ease and durability, but they can be expensive to run if you buy new toner cartridges. However, instead of buying new ones you could think about refilling the old ones. This saves money, saves the planet and appears fairly easy to do with the DIY kits on the market. Forum posts suggest they work pretty well, but you will need to be careful not to get the toner everywhere or damage the actual printer. Just google ‘toner refill’ to find lots of options.

For general office machinery, Brother appear to have a good eco ethic and score quite highly for sustainability. If you need a fax machine, Rioch produce one completely from recycled bits. Dell also seem to be making an effort on the sustainability front.

Never throw away waste electrical equipment (or WEEE as it is officially known). Anyone selling electric or electronic goodies has to provide a disposal route for the old kit that their customers are replacing. They can do this by taking them off your hands at the store (when you buy something new), or arrange for places at which the old kit can be dropped off. The latter requires a dedicated trip to somewhere like your local dump (Civic Amenity Site), but you don’t have to buy anything to take advantage of it. Dell arrange for doorstep collection, which is nice. All this is only for individuals and not companies, but if you work at home on your own there should be little argument about you not paying to dispose of your WEEE.

There is a lot of eco-tat out there for the home office, so if tat is your thing you can shop eco to your hearts content! All sorts of crafty pens, pencils, staplers, hand-made paper, cards, storage boxes, novelty items etc. etc. etc. There is a fair smattering of it in the shop, so please feel free to indulge yourself.

What to do

• Turn things off when not in use.
• Think about buying second-hand and making kit last.
• Refill and repair rather than chuck and replace.
• Buy recycled paper and run a paperless office where possible.
• When you need general office tat, buy eco tat as it is generally sustainable and always better for the planet.

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