Paperless Organization
All materials require resources and have different costs to ecosystems and communities and less than 10% of today’s printing and office paper comes from recycled sources. The vast majority of paper used in the workplace comes from virgin materials, which causes deforestation, monoculture forestry, erosion, depletion of soil health, and puts pressure on neighboring agriculture, land use and livelihoods of local communities in areas around the world where timber is harvested for paper production.
Blue Action: Take five actions towards becoming a paperless organization.
Many actions can be taken to reduce paper consumption in the workplace. Some initial considerations below (this is not an exhaustive list).
Avoid printing emails and memos unless necessary. Explore how information can be filed and disseminated digitally.
Use digital time sheets.
Transition to digital HR documents and processes.
Adopt electronic faxing.
Offer tools to make electronic signatures easy for your employees.
Adopt digital workspace and file sharing tools.
Share digital handouts and publications both internally and externally with clients. Consider when it is necessary to print publications or reports.
Use digital receipts where necessary or applicable.
Scale-back all printing to only business-critical needs. Conduct an internal audit to review and identify these needs.
Reduce and remove printers where possible based on an internal audit of business printing requirements and culture.
Print double-sided on paper where printing is required.
As needed, source recycled paper. Recycled paper requires only ¼ the amount of water as virgin paper, and has less than 1% of the impact on global climate change and ocean acidification.
CALLOUT
While recycled and sustainably managed forestry options are increasingly available, there is not currently enough infrastructure to effectively collect and recycle paper products to meet current demand and only sustainably managed forests that meet the highest reputable standards (such as FSC certification) and monitoring can be trusted as an ethical choice. As such, reducing our consumption will be a critical avenue to reducing negative impact through paper production.
DID YOU KNOW?
Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp.
Manufacturing one ton of office and computer paper with recycled paper stock can save between 3,000 and 4,000 kilowatt hours over the same ton of paper made with virgin wood products.
Preventing 1 ton of paper waste saves between 15 and 17 mature trees.
Source: EPA