Ricoh's 'Green' Effort Helps African Communities

Ricoh is offering its customers the opportunity to help African schools and communities plant fruit trees in a bid to offset carbon emissions and to alleviate poverty.

Ricoh is offering its customers the opportunity to help African schools and communities plant fruit trees in a bid to offset carbon emissions and to alleviate poverty.

The printer manufacturer is working with Seeds for Africa, a charity dedicated to educating young people in Africa about how to farm their own fruit and vegetables to secure reliable and nutritious sources of food by creating their own gardens.

The programme will not only work towards negating carbon emissions caused by printing and photocopying, it will also help combat the massive deforestation affecting parts of Africa.

Chas Maloney, associate director of marketing at Ricoh, said: "Climate change is obviously a growing concern, which puts a scheme like this at the top of Ricoh's CSR agenda.

We have already dedicated thousands of trees through other programmes; this scheme takes it one step further by supporting local communities.

We are strongly committed to reducing the effect that IT has on the environment and this forms part of a continuing strategy." Another part of the programme, which takes place across Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, provides schools, hospitals and farmers with treadle water pumps to irrigate vegetable patches and fruit trees.

Such installations will boost nutrition levels and provide an extra source of income to help communities work themselves out of poverty, said the company.

Ricoh customers can now sign-up to the new programme, which monitors the printer and copier usage levels of businesses.

For every 100,000 photocopies, or prints generated by a customer a tree is planted.

Customers will then be given a certificate at each stage of the programme to assist in their own corporate social responsibility activities.

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