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Staples Supplying Greener Choices

Your local Staples store is often the site of shopping sprees for reams of copier paper, shiny new pens, and printer cartridges galore-disposable, typically non-recycled items that are not exactly eco-friendly. But the office-supply giant is now focused on getting greener, and part of that initiative involves enabling you, the customer, to make environmentally friendly choices. For instance, Staples offers 2,900 products that are made using post-consumer waste material. Stores have accepted rechargeable batteries since 2003 and ink and toner cartridges since 2005 for recycling (the company recycled more than 17 million cartridges last year).

You can now take your computers, printers, and fax machines to Staples stores for recycling in a program started in May. Mike Black, a public-relations program manager, says that Staples is the first national retailer to offer computer recycling in stores every day, so that customers can more easily make a difference.

And bigger changes are afoot. The company is in the initial planning stages to convert its Framingham, MA, headquarters to wind power, and it is also considering using wind power at various distribution centers around the country. Staples currently has solar-power systems installed on nine of its buildings in the U.S.

Black says the company has plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 7 percent by 2010 on an absolute basis (meaning they'll calculate using numbers that take the company's growth into account). Going green? That was easy.

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