A sustainable future for office printing, today

Kyocera’s commitment to sustainability

Environmental conservation has become a significant motivator for decisions in every aspect of our lives, and the workplace is no different. How can document management technology help you to optimise operations and achieve your CSR objectives?

While printing may seem a comparatively trivial consideration, our eBook shows that print and document management can still have a material impact on a typical organisation’s environmental footprint. Documents are integral to the life of most organisations and form the bedrock of both formal and informal workflows. And it isn’t just financial, legal or educational sectors and professionals who rely on them. Scanning, sharing, collaborating and printing documents of all kinds has arguably never been so important to how businesses operate.

However, according to the UK government’s conversion factors for carbon emissions, just 100,000 sheets of A4 paper produces a carbon footprint of 6,000kg and requires eight trees and 2,000kWh of energy. In contrast, if the same paper was recycled seven times it would produce half this amount of carbon (3,200kg) over its entire lifetime.

What’s important to recognise is that organisations can minimise their environmental impact through better choice of print and document management technology. The right combination of hardware and software can create plenty of opportunities to leverage print in a more eco-conscious way.

How sustainability guides our actions

The founding principles of Kyocera are committed to environmental management and aimed squarely at achieving sustainable corporate development (our motto is ‘Respect the Divine and Love People’). In 1991, the ‘KYOCERA Environmental Charter’ was established to reduce the company’s impact on the environment throughout the entire value chain.

All Kyocera operations are now focused on a vision for 2020, divided into three main areas: Green Products, Green Factories and Green Communication. Within Kyocera Document Solutions, innovation has intensified to focus upon longevity, 3R design (reduction, reuse and recycling of components) and low power consumption.

• 99% of Kyocera products are officially designated ‘Green Products’.
• Kyocera has held the ISO 14001 environment certification for over 20 years.
  
• Kyocera Group is part of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative.
  
• The company has won the Japanese Environment Ministry’s ‘Commendation for Global Warming Prevention’ for each of the last 8 years.
  

Kyocera’s commitment to sustainable practices and products is especially visible in our ECOSYS range. The name ‘ECOSYS’ stands for ‘Economy, Ecology and Systems’ and represents our firm commitment to reducing the environmental impact of printing, through optimised workflow efficiency and effortless system/process integration.

Our eBook explores sustainability in the context of your company’s Corporate Social Responsibility objectives. What is the scale of the challenge? How can organisations print less, more productively by using less energy? How far can document management technology innovation optimise sustainability?