Sándor Lakatos

Managing Director

Inest

‘Our mission is to circulate paper to paper. Inest’s business policy integrates corporate social responsibility and environmental protection. Our goal is to collect and recycle paper waste from offices, and recycle them for producing new paper thereby protecting our environment.’

Office paper circulates

Industry: Business services

Date: 2008 and continuous

Climate change


Solutions of the macro-sustainability challenges

Shift to low carbon economy by increasing effective energy use and industrial energy efficiency, promoting clean and environmentally friendly technologies and life cycle assessment

Further targets:

What´s the solution?

Based on the ’from paper to paper’ principle, our company tries to change the life-cycle of office paper waste through recycling. Therefore, we launched our Sustainable Paper Management program that offers a complex solution to office paper collection and recycling.

Firstly, we provide FSC certified copy paper to our customers, thereby offering an environmentally conscious and cost-efficient solution to our partners. After this, unwanted paper is shred according to data security principles and sorted paper waste goes through a pulping process. Through pulping, non-recyclable paper pulp components are separated by machine technology and the remaining paper pulp is ground up. After ground paper pulp was pressed and dried, paper rolls are manufactured. These manufactured paper rolls serve as raw material for recycled paper products (e.g.: handkerchiefs, toilet paper). This means, we produced recycled paper from waste paper at the end. The essence of this program is that paper becomes part of a cycle in which our environmental impact is reduced and lower volume of waste is generated.

Business connection

Since we minimalize the volume of paper waste through recycling, we provide a cost-efficient and environmental friendly alternative. Based on our calculations, this program can generate 15-20% cost-savings to our partners. This is an outstanding rate. Moreover, recycled paper production requires four times less water than conventional papermaking, and paper production from collected paper uses 50% less energy compared to cellulose based production of new paper.

Results

From collected paper waste, environmentally friendly household and sanitary paper products are made, such as 100% recycled handkerchiefs, toilet paper and paper towels. These kinds of products are distributed by our parent company, Nova-Paper Zrt. We set a goal for our whole value chain that we collect and recycle at least the same amount of paper that we sell. In 2015, we have already succeeded in achieving this and we intend to sustain this goal in the future.

Due to our operation less paper waste finishes up in the communal waste, which reduces the costs of communal waste management. Another advantage is that less trees are cut down because used paper is collected and recycled. Last but not least, this program encourages employees to improve their paper collection activities that helps companies to understand and encourage environmentally conscious behaviour more.