GRAND & TOY’S JOURNEY TO A GREENOFFICE
With Canadians’ increased demand for environmental accountability from the companies they purchase from, or do business with—you could say that ‘going green’ has become good for the bottom line.
But that’s not what motivates Grand & Toy to become a GREENOFFICE.
We want to help lead the way to greener business pastures because as a company with over 200,000 customers that delivers to over 6,000 businesses daily, the potential we have to inspire others to become more eco-savvy is both exciting and enormous!
To minimize our own eco-footprint, we invited Deloitte & Touche LLP (world-renowned leaders of corporate responsibility and the development of sustainability programs) to help us get started on the right foot. We then took what we learned and branched off with our own sustainability initiative, which includes concentrating on four key areas: bettering our supply chain, packaging, recycling/ waste and reducing our facilities footprint.
A LITTLE HOUSE GREENING ON THE INSIDE… WHAT WE’VE DONE SO FAR
- Incorporated motion-sensing lighting to reduce energy usage
- Use recycled batteries, electronics and ink & toner cartridges
- Switched to paper with 30 % post-consumer recycled fibre in the office and programmed
printers to print double-sided
- Internally stopped printing packing slips to reduce paper consumption (previously, we produced between 192,000-216,000 slips annually!)
- Reduced the number of printed Ordering Guides last year by over 20% (80,000 copies)—that’s the equivalent of saving 1329 trees, solid waste collected by 7 garbage trucks and the release of greenhouse gasses emitted from 52 cars a year!
HOW WE’RE GREENING FROM THE INSIDE…OUT
- Safely collect ink & toner cartridges as part of our THINK! recycling program—and we
guarantee these items are recycled
- Encourage clients to use one merchant who can handle all their needs to reduce the amount of forms and number of delivery trucks on the road
- Carry/offer a large paper offering with internationally recognized certifications
- Partnered with furniture suppliers that produce GREENGUARD (an environmental non-profit organization with a mission to improve public health, air quality and quality of life) products
- Offer an array of products that are refillable, recycled or remanufactured
- Use airbags instead of Styrofoam in packaging
- Take back used workstations
- Promote going paperless with online ordering and payment option (e-Invoicing)
E-INVOICING - THE POWER OF GOING PAPERLESS
Before 2007, Grand & Toy printed and mailed hundreds of thousands of invoices each year, consuming over 4 million sheets of paper—so we decided something had to change, which led to designing our own unique web-invoice delivery system. The result—an overwhelming response from our client base that has already helped us to save 250,000 sheets of paper! By using this service, clients can see invoices online, track deliveries, and even pay online.
Switching to e-Invoicing saves money and the environment by cutting down the amount of paper and envelopes used for invoices. In fact, last year we sent 120,000 invoices online—that’s 120,000 paper invoices saved!
Small companies use this service because it’s easy and sustainable, while larger clients who prefer to be billed once a month do it because several departments can view invoices/archived bills instantly, and this saves their associates time and money… enabling them to put more ‘green’ into something else.
OUR GREENOFFICE JOURNEY… THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
The greatest thing about any journey is that if offers the opportunity to collect a road of experiences along the way. That’s how we view our own GREENOFFICE journey. As we move forward, we’ll be on the lookout for ways to continually improve on our environmental impact, gaining more knowledge and inspiring more changes the further we go—and the thought that all of those little changes combined can make a world of difference should provide us with enough fuel to empower us all to go the distance, together.