The Paperless Office is Now in Reach… For Everyone
Twenty years ago, the paperless office was deemed inevitable. With changing consumer attitudes and increased technology, all businesses can benefit from going paperless. The paperless office isn’t just for environmental conservation either. Paperless initiatives are typically low cost and can save your business a reasonable amount of money.
The Environmental Aspect
Even if you are not the “tree-huggerish” type, the environmental benefits from creating a paperless office can make you feel pretty good. Creating paper requires a lot of natural resources: trees, water and energy. It takes 1 ½ cups of water to produce one sheet of paper and 17 trees to produce one ton of paper. The average American office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of paper annually. Therefore, millions of trees and gallons of water are used to keep up with our paper consumption. A paperless office will not eliminate paper completely, but it can have positive impacts on the environment. Can you imagine the amount of natural resources saved if every office in America cut their paper consumption in half. If going paperless is still not an option for your business, focus on recycling paper and using recycled paper in your office. Recycling half of the world’s paper would preserve 20 million acres of forest land. However, reducing the worlds paper waste in half is out of your personal reach. But you can start by preserving hundred of trees and gallons of water by recycling practices and implementing paperless office solutions.
The Business Aspect
Preserving the environment is not the only benefit of a paperless office. A paperless office can benefit your business’s bottom line as much as it does for the environment. The first advantage of the paperless office is the amount of time saved from searching for documents. You can now retrieve documents without leaving your desk with cloud storage and document conversion. When you go paperless you will also reduce the expenses of printers, scanners, ink, toner and maintenance cost for those machines. Lastly, you will free up office space by removing the need for bulky and expensive filing cabinets. Make the switch to a paperless office today and save your business money and help the environment. A paperless office is more efficient and less stressful for your employees. Not only will employees be more productive, but they can say they are preserving the environment at the same time.