At interspots it is natural that we follow the three common sense rules of the environment. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Reduce
Purchasing
Products that have very little packaging. Such as OEM rather than boxed.
High quality products which last longer.
If an item does break, our staff has the technical know-how to fix it, as opposed to throwing it out.
Energy
When electronic devices are not in use, power is turned off.
Since our office is south facing we take advantage of the suns radiant heat in the winter by leaving blinds open.
All monitors are set to turn off after 20 minutes of no use.
All printers are set to enter "power saver" mode after 1 minute of no use.
Lights not in use are turned off.
When staff go out to eat we walk or car pool.
Minimal office space is used, requiring less heating.
Many of our staff walk or take public transit to work.
Paper
Invoices are emailed.
Marketing material is printed in-house on a per-need basis, rather than printing thousands of copies.
We notify our vendors to not send us printed marketing material.
All facsimilies are received by a multi-task computer, avoiding waste of ink, paper, and wear on a fax machine.
Reuse
Old computer parts are stored in our storage room for reuse in servers which do not require fast processing.
90% of our printing is done full-duplex, 75% has 4 smaller pages printed per side.
Pages with print errors are kept for scrap notes or reprinting.
Both sides of paper are used for notes.
Office furniture (for example desks, cradenzaas, tables) for the large part are purchased second hand or refurbished.
Some server chassis' are purchased second hand.
When we do receive packaging, we reuse static bags for other hardware and boxes for storage.
Recycle
Paper, Aluminum / Glass Cans, and plastic are sorted and deliverd to random recycling centres.
Unusable computer equipment is currently stored onsite but will be deliverd to a soon to be built, local computer recycling centre. With a new $20-million computer recycling plant expected to start construction in the spring of 2003. Edmonton is soon to turn into the recycling capital of the Pacific Northwest.
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