Besides the fact that my two computer monitors take up some of the real estate that my paper piles used to take up, and the fact that my organizational (and filing) skills are, well, a comedy in the office, my desk is covered in piles of paper. You know, the white 8.5" x 11" type that the age of computers was supposed to eliminate.
Paper is here to stay, for now - but there are still some ways to save those proverbial trees.
An upcoming episode of "Treading Lightly - Minimizing Your Environmental Footprint"* will deal with this very subject. There are many strategies available to help reduce the 'paper trail', but it seems to me that there is the potential for more paper now then there ever has been even though we are now neck deep in the age of electronic data.
The physical paper trail is important for a variety of reasons in whatever industry you work in, whether it be legal, engineering, medical, construction etc. At my workplace I have drawers and drawers of files on paper - at the moment these are deemed necessary as the people that work with these pieces of paper take these paper orders and drawings to a jobsite and use them to build, track and record what happens on that site. Theoretically all of these papers could be on a laptop, but the work and cost involved to accomplish this would be a nightmare, and some of these jobsites are not the place for a laptop computer. What is not in these drawers and drawers of files though are the 'virtual paper trails' that lead to or are created by the actual paper trail - these are stored on a secure server system and are available to those that need to see them with a click of the mouse.
I used to work in an engineering firm where everything had to be recorded and available for all that required access to this information - a great policy that I still stand behind in my own office. However, the binders and binders of communication and notes and drawings that had to be printed so that someone could thumb through all the material to find a particular piece of information just in case the person in charge of that project wasn't there most likely would or could have existed in softcopy somewhere. A simple solution would be to set up the file system so that the same type of project always would have the same type of information filed electronically the same way - and make that accessible to everyone who required it. An added bonus with this is that if the system's servers were available remotely, then you could look anything up from anywhere and not be inconvenienced if you happened to pack the wrong binder on a business trip for example.
There are many ways to set up workplace servers that can be accessible anywhere that there is access to the internet - even for the smallest of businesses. (I can recommend someone for you if you wish - drop me a line!)
Communication, which is so often done by email nowadays fits nicely into this central server storage and accessibility philosophy that it almost doesn't make sense to do it any way else. An added bonus is that email clients are searchable and the days of thumbing through records for a note could almost be gone.
But, nonetheless there is still a need to print - sometimes there is no substitute for the real thing - how many times have you read something on the screen and only when you printed it that you noticed the grammar mistake in the first sentence that your word processor missed?
Here are a couple more ideas for green paper usage:
- Most new copier/fax business machines can send email by scanning a document - try sending the document this way instead of faxing to save the paper on the other end. At the same time, save the digital file for your records for later
- Double side your printing where possible
- Find a paper supply that is made with maximum recycled content
- Use old or superseded paper documents as notepads
- Always recycle paper, including shredding where possible
One last note about why there seems to be more paper than before... Imagine a world without your computer - just think about the last time your server was offline or the power was out. Most of us depend so much on our computers at work that without them we believe that we can't get our job done. Well, we probably could - we just wouldn't get as much done. What the computer has allowed some of us to do is get much more work accomplished in the same amount of time. With all of this extra workload comes more paper trails, this is why my desk is still so full of paper. The computer has allowed us to save paper on a per job basis, but thanks to our friend the computer, we are working on so much more now at a time that the printers are as busy as ever.
I appreciate your comments, feel free to drop me a line and remember - keep those filters clean!
*"Treading Lightly - Minimizing Your Environmental Footprint" is heard across Alberta on the CKUA Radio Network and around the world on the internet at ckua.com.
