What is your company doing to promote sustainability?
Remember the “paperless office?” The “paperless office” became a buzzword after being introduced in an article, “The Office of the Future,” in Business Week in 1975. It coincided with the advent of the personal computer, and the hope was that all documents could be processed electronically and that paper would become irrelevant.
But, has paper disappeared? Not at all. A few industries have gone paperless and some countries are decreasing their paper consumption. Actually, paper consumption is still increasing globally - soaring to extremely high levels (some estimates go as high as 10-50 trillion pages!). Paper continues to predominate in activities that involve knowledge work, reading and collaboration.
So how should your industry go about managing paper now and in the future, to really promote sustainability?
It starts with a careful, controlled and responsible usage of paper - using simple best practices such as thinking twice when you print, using environment-friendly paper, or (in the near future) preferring substitutes such as ePaper or transient paper.
It continues with printing duplex and N-pages up, or responsibly using color and other advanced techniques to make your printed documents as valuable as possible.
You should then go on with a careful optimization of your output infrastructure. Not only will right-sizing enable you to better control your costs and paper usage, but also its carbon footprint - this calculator lets you estimate your print fleet's impact.
You can find the above tips and many more in this white paper or visit the downloads section of Patricia Calkins's web site to learn more about "Smarter Ways to Green."
Francois Ragnet
Managing Principal, Technology Innovation
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