Question

Each day, you observe numerous practices in your office that are not "environmentally friendly" and that also cost your company money. A lot of paper is wasted, for instance, on print jobs that no one claims. Identify one of these practices and write an unsolicited internal proposal to your supervisor that outlines your plan to reduce the amount of waste and save your company money.

Develop a response that includes examples and evidence to support your ideas, and which clearly communicates the required message to your audience. Organize your response in a clear and logical manner as appropriate for the genre of writing. Use well-structured sentences, audience-appropriate language, and correct conventions of standard American English.

Answer 1

There is a solution to the huge amounts of paper waste in our cooperate offices nationwide. The throwing away of memos, reports and other printed waste increases our expenses not only for the initial cost of printing, but also for the cost of disposal. Our company can cut our supply and disposal expenses in half by reducing our paper usage, reusing as much of the paper we already have and recycling any paper we are unable to use.

It has been estimated that office employees consume thousands of paper products every year. The cost of this can be estimated at $16,000 per employee per year in just the cost of copy paper alone. By cutting the absurd amount of paper used by employees we will be helping our pocket books and the environment as well. We went green way before it was popular to do so with our reusable bags and our e-mail promotions. By asking now that employees check their print jobs before they print and that they do all their editing on their computers we will be combining our uses of environment-friendly office practices with the cutting-edge technology that we take pride in using.

Here are some examples of polices that should be considered for adoption:

• First, we should request employees print only the most important materials. Place and enforce a limit on printed e-mails and require employees to store their work digitally. This will also save us on fire insurance because there will be less flammable materials in our offices.
• Next, we should request employees always revise their work digitally before they print and make sure employees use both sides of paper and to single space their papers to limit excess waste.
• We should request that letterhead, copier paper, computer head, scratch, notepad, and tablet paper along with envelopes, stationary, and typing paper be recycled.
• All reports that are not confidential can be used as scratch paper.