Sustainable Business

Resources Paper & Publishing 4/4 215 locations globally, consuming a total of 150 million kWh of electricity (excluding Data Centres) and generating 61,000 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent, emphasising the importance of employee engagement. These figures are resonating through the company's workforce, with office paper printing activity having fallen by 59% per capita and paper purchased decreasing by 39% across all major offices since 2008. This has come down to educating the workforce and the implementation of double-sided printing as a default option on all printers with duplex capability. These measures have accumulated $687,000 worth of savings from Bloomberg's print environment. A relatively small contribution compared with the $8m saved from its overall efficiency strategy that looks at its technology and print operations. However, further paper efficiency is set to increase savings through other simple initiatives proposed by Ballin and his sustainable development team. One initiative is the planned roll-out, this year, of 'follow me' print technology, which requires employees to use their ID badges to release print jobs and virtually eliminate inadvertent print jobs. This initiative is being implemented slowly says Ballin as it's quite a "cultural change". "Nothing drives me crazier than walking around the building, particularly during business planning time, and looking at all these uncollected jobs that people print but never collect. And so we feel this initiative could drastically reduce our printing further. We've tested it and we got an additional 20% reduction in paper on the printers that we tested," he adds. Ballin says these actions may seem "easy and trivial" but they can have a "truly substantial" effect on both a company's environmental impact, as well as its bottom line. And these measures are only going to drive environmental reductions further and build on the $43m the company has saved in total since launching its sustainability strategy in 2007, he adds. "To us it's now become second nature. For any company that wants to follow, we hope that they can use some of these successes that we've pointed out in our sustainability report as a roadmap for wins... Any It's easy ld take the company wou ngs $43m in savi getting started, because it's easy wins, a lot of these measures are very easy. Any company would take $43m in savings, whether you're Bloomberg, a technology company or a bank". And it isn't just saving money Bloomberg's efficiency measures helped the company achieve its CO2 reduction target in 2011, two years ahead of schedule - an impressive benchmark for future targets. However, with print communication remaining one of Bloomberg's main markets, ambitious reduction targets may be harder to achieve. But Ballin says further awareness of efficiency and demand reduction amongst customers, suppliers and employees, along with rational investment in efficient technology, Bloomberg will be on track to become the world's most sustainable publisher. No simple feat, he stresses.

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