The world is open for business once again and most of us are back in the office at our old desks. The two years of the pandemic, while being traumatic for many, have also been a defining period for most of us. As our life paused, we took stock of our lifestyles, our consumption patterns, and our impact on the environment, and resolved to do better.
With the amount of time we spend at home, also the space we are emotionally most invested in, it is inevitable that our home is the starting point for our transition to more sustainable ways. If you have not read it yet, do read our guide to making your home plastic-free here.
After home, the place we spend the longest time is our workplace. And though we don’t realise it, often a lot of plastic gets used, unknowingly, in our offices.
This Plastic-free July, which also marks the countrywide ban on several single-use plastic items, is a good time to introduce a culture of sustainability and low waste in your offices. These handy tips will help you & those who work with you to create a plastic-free workspace.
Plastic-Free Stationery And Décor
One of the quickest swaps you can make is phasing out and replacing your workplace stationery with sustainable alternatives. Even the most digital-led or paperless offices end up using quite a lot of other forms of stationery such as pens, pencils, and diaries during daily operations. These can easily become sources of plastic waste, because most ball-point pens, gel pens, paper clips, etc. are made of plastic. Often, these are absent-mindedly discarded too.
- Consider alternatives like seed pens or pencils (these can simply be planted after use!), bamboo pens, and more.’
- For your desks, choose coconut shell pen stands, use old mugs as pencil holders, and tiny money plants or bonsai plants as décor, lending an aesthetic touch to your space while keeping the office air clean and avoiding plastic flowers or plants for decoration!
- As an added effort to keep your consumption in check, change the default settings of your printer to ensure you print on both sides and save paper in the process. That being said, avoid print-outs as far as possible!
- Use notebooks and journals made in recycled or eco-friendly paper. You can find all these provisions on sustainable marketplaces like Brown Living or Loopify. You can also find sustainable office supplies through local brands like Greenfootprint, Ecoshi, Clan Earth, Goli Soda and On Earth to name a few. To know more about the ins and outs of sustainable stationery, click here.
Plastic-Free Office Washrooms
Unlike the home, which is a more controlled environment, your office bathrooms are open to all. Maintaining a clean and eco-friendly bathroom may require some amount of effort, but with a few practical swaps, this transition will be easy. Here’s what you can do to stay plastic-free in this intimate yet busy area of the office:
- Swap the basics: For small offices, replace liquid soap that comes in plastic bottle dispensers with environmentally friendly soap bars. For larger office spaces, liquid soap is a safer bet, although the plastic refill packs may add up to your waste output. Consider services like Refillable (currently only in Mumbai or Bangalore), a door-to-door service that refills all your liquid cleaning agents periodically, sparing you the need to shop for packaged refills. The added advantage is that all their refill brands are also natural and sustainable. Also, avoid plastic diffusers and chemical air fresheners and choose glass or ceramic diffusers which require just a few drops of essential oil to work their magic, even in larger spaces!
Source: Refillable
- Switch to eco-friendly cleaning alternatives: Keeping your office loos clean requires equipment. From toilet brushes to floor cleaners and scrubs, almost everything found in the market is made of plastic. You can replace these with plastic-free options like coconut coir brushes. Coconut fibre or coir brushes are also considered to be naturally anti-bacterial. You can find them through sustainable brands like On Earth, Almitra Sustainables, and Taal Mell.
- Set a few policies: Keeping the office loo plastic-free is also dependent on the personal waste produced by those who use it. So, encourage conscious individual choices in the workplace by communicating that you’re phasing plastic out as a policy and asking employees to be mindful of their waste too. In women’s bathrooms, replace the stock of regular sanitary pads provided with organic cotton ones. And have a segregated bin for any plastic waste.
Plastic-Free Pantry
The office pantry or kitchen is another source of plastic waste if not managed well. However, with a few basic changes, you can not only reduce plastic waste but also end up cutting down on costs! Here’s how:
- Be smart when you stock: When shopping for your office pantry, avoid single-use coffee sachets or tea bags. These ‘use and throw’ packets add to the daily waste output pretty swiftly. Instead, opt for loose tea leaves that chai drinkers can brew, and larger coffee bottles. The tea leaves can always be reused as fodder for the office plants, and empty coffee bottles (that are made of glass or tin) can be reused in multiple ways or simply refilled! Shopping in larger quantities over small packs or sachets also ends up being more cost-effective in the long run. This is especially useful for large offices with high employee footfalls. Similarly, for snacks, instead of stocking on packets of chips and biscuits, tie up with a local kirana store or small bakery to send you a supply of fresh snacks, biscuits, and more. These can be stored in reusable glass or steel boxes in the office pantry and make plastic-free snacking easy!
- Rely on reusables: The office water cooler is undeniably the place that sees the most action. And while the idle gossip is harmless, the single-use water cups that accumulate quickly at this social hotspot are not so as they generate avoidable plastic waste. To avoid this, encourage the use of reusable water bottles at the workplace. Most of your employees may already be used to carrying their own bottles. If not, make the most of the upcoming gifting season by gifting a set of reusable bottles and/or customised coffee mugs to all, to press home the point!
- Have smart meetings – Insist on carrying re-usable bottles and mugs to off-site visits, company picnics and outdoor client meetings. Make it a point to stock up on some glasses and water jugs for conferences and meetings at the office. This prevents the need to hand out plastic water bottles at office gatherings. The same rule applies to cutlery. Stock up on reusable cutlery in the office kitchen. As a rule, you can encourage everyone to use these, or bring their own forks and spoons, and avoid ordering disposable plastic cutlery with their food or snack orders.
Plastic-Free Gifting
Plastic-free gifting can accelerate the change in office culture and make the shift fun and exciting.
Plastic-free gifting can accelerate the change in office culture and make the shift fun and exciting.
- Eco-friendly corporate gifts such as stationery kits, laptop bags made of sustainable materials or reusable coffee kits, for example, are always going to be a hit with your staff. They’re also gender and culture-neutral gifts that have a practical use-case for all.
- Explore sustainable corporate gift sets on marketplaces like Loopify and Brown Living. For sustainable office bags, look up brands like Dwij for their upcycled denim collection or even try laptop sleeves made of pineapple leather by Bejo!
Source: Dwij
- Promote meaningful and sustainable gifting culture by avoiding consumption altogether, and opting for ‘Gift a tree’ services via organisations like Reforest India and Grow-Trees. For a small fee, they’ll plant trees on behalf of whoever you wish to gift them to, and send them a certificate in their name!
To help you further navigate sustainable gifting for the upcoming festive season, check out our informative guide here.
Plastic-Free Packaging
This one is mostly for product-led businesses. Whether you’re a tiny Instagram business, a food delivery service or even a large-scale manufacturer, packaging waste is a growing concern and calls for a shift. Fortunately, there are now alternatives available, and here are a few for you to consider:
- Replace packing tapes and bubble wrap that are made of plastic with water-activated packing tape made of kraft paper. You can find this on Brown Living along with other sustainable packing materials.
- For smaller orders that don’t risk breaking, avoid bubble wrap and reuse old newspapers for packing. Brands like Ecosattva also create eco-friendly honeycomb paper wraps and filling paper. These are both recyclable and compostable.
- Local brands like Regeno and Eco 365 also create compostable and water-soluble courier bags, that you can use for packaging your orders.
Source: Regeno
BONUS: Plastic-Free Waste Management
Once you start your plastic-free transition, you’ll likely want to go above and beyond. So here are some bonus tips to help you manage any plastic waste in your workspace:
- If you can’t reuse, recycle! For the times where you’re stuck with unwanted plastic waste, tie up with a neighbourhood recycling service to responsibly manage the waste.
- For dry waste in the office, use metal bins that don’t require the use of any garbage bags. For wet waste, swap out conventional garbage bags for compostable ones.
- You can also invest in a compost bin for your office. All the wet and organic food waste can then be converted into useful compost and used to grow the office garden!
Once you learn how to manage waste, it also becomes easy to raise the bar and work towards going zero-waste! Read our beginner’s guide here, to kickstart your journey.
Maintaining a plastic-free office is as important as creating one. Make being plastic-free a part of the office culture by sustaining these ethics, reinforcing the principles and keeping your co-workers involved through fun workshops, cleanliness drives on offsites, and regular brainstorming sessions for new initiatives.
To know more about the #PlasticFreeChallenge, the many winning campaigns and some motivating examples for your team, click here.
A clean, green, and plastic-free workspace is sure to make for more engaged and happy teams and a rewarding work environment, so don’t wait for next July and make a start now!
