Making your home office more sustainable doesn't have to mean a complete overhaul. Small, practical changes can make a genuine difference — to your environmental footprint, and sometimes to your running costs too.
Here are five straightforward things you can do, starting today.
1. Print More Thoughtfully
The most eco-friendly print is the one you didn't need to make. Before hitting print, it's worth asking whether a digital version would serve just as well — an emailed PDF, a saved document, a photo on your phone.
When you do need to print, a few simple habits help reduce waste:
- Print double-sided — most modern printers support this, and it halves your paper use immediately
- Use draft mode for internal documents — it uses significantly less ink and is perfectly readable for anything you don't need to look polished
- Preview before printing — catching a formatting issue on screen rather than after the fact saves both paper and ink
- Print multiple pages per sheet for documents you're printing just to read, rather than to file or share
None of these require any new equipment — just a small change in habit.
2. Recycle Your Ink Cartridges — It's Free and Takes Minutes
Ink cartridges are one of the most straightforward things to recycle from a home office, yet most end up in landfill. A single inkjet cartridge can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and the ink residue inside is classed as hazardous waste.
The good news is that recycling them properly is genuinely easy. At Crazy Kangaroo, every order of genuine HP or Canon ink comes with a free prepaid recycling bag — when your cartridge runs out, it goes in the bag and straight back in the post. No cost, no effort.
If you have cartridges to recycle right now, you can download a free Freepost returns label from our website. It works for any genuine HP or Canon cartridge, whether you bought it from us or not.
It's one of those things that takes about 30 seconds to set up and then becomes second nature.
3. Choose Genuine Ink Cartridges
This one isn't obvious until you look into it. Genuine ink cartridges — made by HP, Canon, Epson and Brother — are manufactured to tighter tolerances than compatible alternatives, which means less ink waste per page and more reliable yields. You get more prints from the cartridge, which means fewer replacements over time.
Genuine cartridges are also the ones accepted by manufacturer recycling schemes. Compatible and refilled cartridges generally aren't, which means they're more likely to end up in landfill at the end of their life regardless of your intentions.
If sustainability matters to you, choosing genuine ink is actually the more responsible option — as well as the more reliable one.
4. Switch to Recycled or Responsibly Sourced Paper
Paper is the other significant consumable in a home office. Look for paper that carries the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) mark — this means the wood pulp used to make it comes from responsibly managed forests. Most major paper brands now offer FSC-certified options at broadly similar prices to standard paper.
Recycled office paper has improved significantly in quality over the years and is now perfectly suitable for everyday printing. It tends to work best with standard documents and text — for photo printing or anything colour-critical, manufacturer-recommended photo paper still gives the best results with genuine ink cartridges.
Buying paper in larger quantities — a box of reams rather than a single ream at a time — also reduces packaging waste and usually works out cheaper per sheet.
5. Manage Your Devices More Efficiently
Office equipment — printers, monitors, computers — accounts for a meaningful share of home energy use, particularly if devices are left running or on standby unnecessarily.
A few habits that help:
- Turn monitors off rather than leaving them on screensaver — a screensaver uses almost as much energy as active use
- Use your printer's power-saving mode — most modern inkjet printers have a sleep or eco mode that reduces energy consumption during idle periods
- Switch off at the plug when not in use for extended periods — with one important exception: inkjet printers should be switched off using their own power button rather than at the wall, as they run a short maintenance cycle on shutdown that protects the printheads
- Consider whether you need a separate scanner and printer — an all-in-one device uses less energy and takes up less space than two separate machines
Small Changes, Genuine Impact
None of these changes require significant investment or effort. Printing double-sided, recycling cartridges, and switching to FSC paper are all things you can start doing this week. Over a year, those small habits add up — less waste, lower running costs, and a home office that's a little easier on the environment.
If you're ready to make recycling part of your routine, find out more about our free ink cartridge recycling service — it's available to everyone, with no minimum order required.
