Mobile apps to aid recycling industry cost efficiency
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - 10:01:52
Many businesses are looking to save money and behave sustainably by reducing the amount of paper they use on a daily basis.
Paper is not only an expensive resource to acquire in large quantities, but its usage can be damaging to the global environment if it is not sourced responsibly or recycled.
In addition, the storage of paper files requires significant resources that many businesses simply cannot sustain.
However, a new scheme to introduce smartphone apps in place of paper records could help the British waste and recycling industry save up to 12 million each year, according to the Environment Agency Business Advisory Group.
It is necessary to catalogue all of the waste that people in the UK send to landfill or recycling centres each year and this generates about 23 million transfer notes annually, according to Waste Management World.
In total there are at least 50 million individual sheets of paper involved in this process at any one time, either in direct usage or in storage.
By taking the time to shift over to an app-based environment, in which transfers of recycling and waste could be recorded by portable devices, as digital files, a significant sum could be saved.
Of this 12 million reduction in expense, only about 2.3 million is accounted for by paper saving alone. The rest goes on admin and IT, which shows just how much infrastructure is required to support a paper-based system.
Although the paperless office environment is one that only a small number of businesses can truly embrace, the idea that you can reduce usage and improve efficiency, as well as cutting costs while going green, is a positive one.
Hopefully, smartphone apps like this will spread to other industries and be adopted as keenly as they have been in the consumer space.
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