Yeah, and some work in the office would help with costs too
I work in an almost paperless office. Everything is saved on the computers and at the end of every day the secretary walks from one computer to the next backing up the whole thing. I have never asked her where she keeps the backup device, whatever it is. But watching this obsessive backing up got me thinking about my own computer at home. I applied for a Personal Loan and went to the local computer shop and bought myself a back-up device which I now use about once month.
The old days
Remember how things used to be in the office? I started working when I left school at the age of 18. It was a small engineering office and the suite of offices was wall-to-wall paper. At 5 every evening, at the end of the day’s work, everyone had to arrange all the paper on their desks in neat piles and carry it to a fire-proof strong room, which had a door like Fort Knox, where it would be locked up overnight. Who exactly is being obsessive! No one ever talked about saving paper and in fact, when I think back, we wasted a lot of paper on meaningless tasks. But that’s how the world was back then.
Paperless
According to Melinda Stoker, director of marketing for Xerox Corporation’s DocuShare business unit, decreasing paper usage or going “paper light” is a strategy that reaps several positive results. “If the U.S. cut its office paper use by roughly 10%, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1.6 million tons. That would be the same as taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.” Nowadays “going green” is a trendy option for companies and organizations are finding real value in reducing their carbon footprint, with benefits that include significant cost savings and increased worker productivity.
Home printing
Years ago I rushed out and bought a color printer. I was frantically busy with new projects and I didn’t notice that I was ordering color ink refills every week. The cost of these got lost in the cost of everything else and when you’re making money, who cares? When the rush was over I noticed what was going on. I bought a black and white laser printer and things returned to normal. After a couple of months I found that I was hardly printing at all and the only user was my wife. That has stopped too and these days we rarely print. Each time we do, I pray that the printer hasn’t forgotten its role in life.
Around the U.S.
Melinda Stoker says that we should all take a look around the office and evaluate how workers use paper documents. She has provided some statistics related to paper usage in the U.S.:
- The average office worker prints 10,000 pages per year and wastes 1,410 pages.
- The average cost of a wasted page is six cents.
- A company with 500 employees spends $42,000 on wasted print-outs a year.
- Only 49% of office workers say they recycle at work.
- Every ton of recycled paper saves three cubic meters of landfill space.
- It takes 10 times more energy to manufacture a piece of paper than to create another print or copy.
- Stoker recommends that companies deploy a “paper light” document management strategy.
