Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Sustainability effort: moving small office

Dec 11, 2008 22:04 pm / Add a comment

I did it again.….  I let a few months slip by with­out writ­ing anything.

August, Sep­tem­ber were really busy, then came mid Octo­ber and nothing.  So this is what it’s like to be, affected by the eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion of the time.

Being a small oper­a­tion, it was an easy deci­sion to close my stu­dio, espe­cially the com­pany that shared it with me moved out.  So the very basic thing about the office has been proved again.  Office is where you go to see the peo­ple you like, to be with the peo­ple you like.  And if you can work some­where else, you don’t need a big, ded­i­cated office.

But I think the non-Japanese would be inter­ested in what the small busi­ness does when they move their office, espe­cially the envi­ron­men­tal consideration.  So here are few things:

1.  We really sep­a­rate our trash!  Even on day-to-day oper­a­tion, we have a few bins, cans, bot­tles, recy­clable papers, mag­a­zines and books, burn­able, non-burnable, big non-burnable devices. When we move, we have to com­ply with this too.

2.  For project papers, most of the major Japan­ese com­pa­nies are really strict about pro­tect­ing their information.  Major­ity of the stuff is really not worth all that hoopla, but I signed the con­tract say­ing I’ll pro­tect their infor­ma­tion at the degree they require, so that’s that.  For­tu­nately, we have a great ser­vices avail­able to us from logis­tic companies.  For instance, Yam­ato deliv­ery ser­vices would bring you a box, you fill it with con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments, and they will pick it up, recy­cle the whole thing, the doc­u­ment and the box, with­out open­ing it.  1,800 yen per box which is about 5,000 sheets of A4 papers.  This time, I recy­cled about 15,000 sheets of these con­fi­den­tial documents.

3.  I decided to throw away my multi-function printer, which is in the cat­e­gory of large un-recyclable devices.  For this, I had to pur­chase a sticker for this cat­e­gory of trash, and call the city ser­vice to come pick it up.  The prices for these item differs.  PC’s and home elec­tronic goods are more expen­sive to throw away, up to 10,000 yen.  When you are buy­ing a new one to replace old one, the man­u­fac­tur­er  will take back the old one, but in my case, it was a throw away so this didn’t work.

4.  Since most of my office fur­ni­tures were made by my hus­band with recy­cled par­ti­cle board, it was easy to take them apart.  It was col­lected by the recy­cle com­pany that does these sort of things.  The peo­ple I shared the office had lots more fur­ni­ture stuff than me to recy­cle, so they hired this recy­cling company.  They let me add my stuff to theirs.

I remem­ber 15 years ago when I was in charge of a small move within the com­pany I was with.  In those days, we just threw every­thing together for it to be shipped out to the landfill.  We’ve come a long way.  And still have a long way to go!

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