Xerox Going Green!

Xerox Employees’ are Going Green!

Xerox announced last year that they would like to push their business towards being more “Environmentally Friendly” or as we like to call it here at Benchmark Office Systems “Green”.  They asked their employees to come up with ideas on how their company could achieve this goal.  Employees of Xerox all over the globe were a part of this corporate wide program called “Earth Awards”.  The result of this program was a savings of $10.2 million dollars for Xerox and 2.6 million pounds of waste. 

This Xerox company-wide competition narrowed down to 30 nominations.  From that there were 13 winners announced.  These winners came from all across North America and Europe. 

In Wilsonville, OR, a research team developed a design for a small packaging for one of Xerox’s colored ink lines.   The internal packaging of this ink was reduced in content.  It is now made from 100% post-consumer recycled material.  The box in which the ink is contained is now composed of 43% recycled material. 

In Webster, NY a toner plant created a more efficient system for processing wastewater.  This new system brought in an annual savings of $80,000 and there was 60% less wastewater going offsite for disposal.   Also the amount of water required for mixing raw toner materials was slashed by one-third. 

In Ireland, a crew developed a system to revamp the rate at which ink from toners was imprinted on papers.  The result of this was 70,000 less pounds of waste that was being sent to the landfills while also saving the division $132,000. 

It was in Grovepoint, Ohio where the largest savings were found.  A group of employees had big waste reduction.  These workers came up with a recycling program for cardboard boxes, a process for efficient return of wooden pallets, as well as a process of streamlined use and reuse of packaging materials from paper to polystyrene gave them a savings of $738,000 a year. 

Xerox employees have paved the way for other companies to “Go Green”!  If every company took the proper steps to “Go Green” think of all the savings that could be made and all the good we could be doing for our planet!