By Ed Avis
Helping the environment does not require huge programs. Even small steps matter in the long run. That’s how Ken Karbeling feels.
“It’s not that our customers were asking for it, but it feels like you have to do what you can,” says Karbeling, general manager of American Reprographics in Rockville, Maryland.
Karbeling’s efforts to do his small part for the environment began at least 15 years ago, he says. He initiated a bunch of programs aimed at keeping stuff out of the landfill. None of these by itself is a major effort, but taken together, they definitely help:
- All of the company’s waste paper and corrugated cardboard is recycled; a local paper company picks it all up about once a week. Another company picks up their used skids for re-use elsewhere.
- When they have a print job that might be damaged in transit, they wrap it around one of the 3” cores they save from their media rolls.
- They take all their spent toner cartridges – and some from customers – to Staples, where they get a $2 credit for each one.
- A local woman comes to the shop and picks up all their aluminum cans and sells them to a recycler. Plastic and glass bottles also get recycled.
Karbeling says the first challenge in starting the program was getting buy-in from his employees. Some didn’t want to bother.
“They would say, ‘Go ahead, Ken, you recycle as much as you want. Make yourself feel good,’” he says. He remembers one employee who intentionally cut up the plastic bags their diazo paper came in because he didn’t want to make the effort to set them aside for customers who used them as trash bags.
Eventually, though, Karbeling was able to change the culture. He trained new employees on the importance of putting the recyclables in the right place, and he explained to them these efforts were saving money, since they were keeping stuff out of the dumpster. Because they’re not filling it with waste paper, cores, cans, toner cartridges, etc., they can use a smaller dumpster than they’d otherwise need, saving money every month.
“I would say we’ve saved thousands of dollars over the past 20 years,” he says. “We haven’t completely eliminated our waste, but our trash costs are considerably less than they would be otherwise since we have only one relatively small dumpster.”
His community doesn’t have a business recycling program, so he put a notice in Craigslist that they had aluminum cans available. That’s how they connected with the local woman who recycles them for cash; now she stops by whenever Karbeling texts her to say they have a full bin.
Their scrap paper is picked up by a business called Georgetown Paper Stock, a local paper recycler and document destroyer. “We don’t get paid for the mixed paper that gets picked up like we used to, but we don’t pay to have it hauled away. So all of our excess paper just vanishes once a week. I don’t know what the paper is reused for, but Georgetown Paper Stock picks it and we pay nothing to have it hauled away.”
Some of the company’s customers get involved, too. They ask Karbeling to pick up old blueprints that need to be scrapped and toner cartridges that can be recycled. They also give him their excess 3” cores. A former employee made them a wooden bin especially designed to hold the 3" cores.
“I have a lot of those 3” cores, so anything we ship out that might get dented we wrap around the cores and that protects them,” he explains. “I try to do green things in an easy way and it becomes a way of life.”
One green thing that American Reprographics does not do is use recycled bond. That was popular 20 years ago but is hardly available anymore. Karbeling says customers don’t ask for recycled paper these days, and even when they did back in the day he found it somewhat difficult to meet their requests.
“It wasn’t an easy thing to make work. We needed double the space for paper inventory, and we were given all sorts of things to show chain-of-custody that we weren’t really interested in doing,” he says.
Otherwise, though, Karbeling feels his green efforts are solid.
“We make every effort to reuse and recycle,” he says. “Everybody here knows how to do it. It has just become the normal way of doing business.”
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