I have a confession to make right up front. I print lots of stuff. My computer is filled with thousands maybe even millions of files but I still find many things that I want to keep on paper. Another person in my company hates it whenever someone brings a piece of paper in his office. If I happen to bring one in and start to leave without it, he gently reminds me to come back and take it with me.
Computers have added huge productivity gains to business but there are still lots of gains to go. If you work at a hospital or health care facility, please tell them I am tired of filling out the same form in every department. It addition to paper, it would save them time and money and me aggravation, to buy cheap portable computers, let me fill in my info once and have it available all over the facility. OK, enough venting, this article is about paper.
Every office (well almost every office) still uses it. Recognizing that, how can we manage our use of paper and still be green?
o Print on both sides. Copy machines can do this automatically. If you are a small business with a less sophisticated printer, under print options, you can print odd pages only and then flip the sheets and print even pages only.
o Use recycled paper. The quality now is so much better you can hardly tell the difference. If you have a special paper for your clients, you can keep a stack of recycled paper to use for internal printing.
o Possibly repurpose and definitely recycle any paper you are finished with. You can repurpose it into notepaper/scrap paper. (You could also make a paper airplane but that would not be good use of company time.) Recycling is now easily available and a critical step in reusing resources. – Did you know that office workers throw away (hopefully recycling them) one trillion pages a year?
o Think about whether you really need to print something out to hand to everyone at a meeting. Can you post the agenda on one large piece of paper and save making a copy for each individual?
Printed documents have moved our world out of the dark ages. We need to manage them effectively so we can continue to use them into the far future.
Paperless Office – Where are You? - To learn more about this author, visit Dixie Schmatz's Website.
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“I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.”
-William Blake
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