Europe's Firms Print Away 'Green Cred'

New research from Ricoh shows that Europe’s business leaders are unnecessarily missing opportunities to reduce environmental impacts and drive efficiencies through document governance. There are also marked differences per country with some performing better than others.

The research finds that only a minority of European businesses are setting targets and auditing the environmental aspects of their document governance, which includes energy efficiency and recycling. While 67 per cent of senior managers set cost targets for document governance just 41 per cent set environmental targets.

This suggests that European bosses are underestimating the positive contribution of cost reduction strategies on their organisation’s sustainability goals.  Likewise, it means that ongoing sustainability improvements will be challenging for many businesses due to the absence of consistent measurement and auditing processes.

The research also finds that most organisations are adopting a decentralised approach to document governance (Just 39 per cent of companies have implemented a strategy in their business).  This means they are overlooking the simple tactical actions that can make an immediate and positive impact on sustainability. Key results include:

• 32 per cent of business leaders say that their employees do what they like when it comes to duplex printing (printing on both sides of the paper) and just 18 per cent have implemented a policy company-wide;

• Almost half (47 per cent) of European business leaders are unfamiliar with their company’s recycling policy and 40 per cent with their toner recycling policy;

• When asked whether employees consider environmental benefits when printing respondents scored their employees at just 5.5 using a scale of 10 (care a lot) to one (do not care at all).

Key to addressing these issues is a centralised document governance strategy that delivers insight across the whole organisation and provides factual data upon which success and savings are monitored and new areas for improvement set. With such an approach, business leaders can then start making a real difference today by taking advantage of the tactical ‘quick wins’ available to them.

When comparing activity across Europe, there are significant differences between countries in terms of their adoption of sustainable document governance.  France is the leading country in Europe while the UK & Ireland comes last. By assigning a value to environmental aspects of document governance such as, recycling, setting targets, auditing, recycling and employee behaviours - it is possible to generate a European league table to show which countries have the most sustainable document governance practices. In the Ricoh Document Governance Index, the seven countries tracked can be ordered as follows:

1. France
2. Italy
3. Germany
4. Netherlands
5. Belgium
6. Spain
7. United Kingdom

However none of the countries score above 50 per cent of the possible ‘maximum score’, suggesting that there is significant room for improvement to reduce overall environmental impacts.

Tom Wagland, Environmental Management Group, Ricoh Europe, said: “Despite sustainability being an important fixture on the business agenda, and documents making up an essential part of day-to-day business operations, there remains a lack of awareness of the role that document governance can play in driving both environmental AND business efficiencies. Businesses need to act now by taking some simple steps to improve the way they are managing and controlling their document workflows.”

Sustainable Document Governance in Practice

As a result of Ricoh's Pay Per Page Green assessments and optimisation service, businesses across Europe are adding value to their bottom line and reducing their environmental impacts.  

• A public sector organisation in the Netherlands reduced energy consumption by just over 75% and paper consumption by 10.3%;

• A German automotive organisation has projected cost savings of €920,000, reduced paper by 3,388 tons and CO2 by 4,934 tons over the contract period;

• A France-based company, also within the automotive industry, is benefiting from annual savings of €160,000 as a result of reducing energy consumption by more than 535,000 kWh

• A pharmaceutical company - with sites in Italy - has projected reductions in annual Kwh usage by 27.8%,  paper consumption by 10.3% and overall environmental impact by 15.8%

To download the whitepaper: www.ricoh-europe.com/research