Cradle to cradle paper

An innovative project by Banner Business Supplies closes the loop on office paper by supplying copier paper manufactured from a customer's own waste paper. Banner collects waste paper from the office (both confidential and general waste), securely shreds and de-inks it and transforms it back into blank paper for delivery back to the office it came from.

According to Banner, Closed Loop Paper uses 50% less water, 60% less energy causes 70% less air pollution than virgin paper. The process uses no bleach and the manufacturing process is fully audited. It's an impressive service - but it does depend on the customer having sufficient volume of waste paper to make the process viable. Closed Loop Paper was developed in response to demand from HMRC and currently processes around 25,000 tonnes per year.

As more organisations try to reduce their reliance on hard copy, I can foresee issues caused by the declining supplies of paper from single customers. But this concept would work really well across a whole business park or even a town or city, creating local employment opportunities as well as reducing transport impacts by recycling paper as close as possible to where the waste originates.

The dawn of the paperless book

With the publication of its Q4 results, Amazon.com has announced that it is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. In 2010, for every 100 paperback books Amazon sold, it sold 115 Kindle books. During the same time period it sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These figures relate to Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and include sales of books where there is no Kindle edition but exclude free Kindle books, so they are conservative.

I love my Kindle - the reading experience of the Pearl e-ink display is pleasingly like paper and it consumes very little energy - with wifi switched off the battery life is remarkably long. The device is lighter than all but the thinnest paperbacks, too. Acquiring a new title requires no paper and ink to be consumed, incurs no transport burden and creates no waste. There's the embodied energy in the e-reader to consider, of course, but I plan to keep mine for a very long time and I'm a voracious reader, so that should mean the carbon payback won't take too long.

I've been in the office equipment industry longer than I care to admit to, and all that time I've been hearing about the holy grail of the paperless office. Yet in a single year, Amazon has made real the dream of the paperless library.