Like most people I am sure you keep weekends for some house related activities like cleaning, grocery shopping, arranging things and all.  Similar activity I was doing today when I saw a bunch of discarded printouts from banks, insurance companies and other marketing pamphlets asking me to take action.  Some of the printouts were from my office which I brought home so that I can work from home.

Looking at the quantity of these discarded papers which I was going to throw in trash, I felt bad.  How bad we are behaving with our own Nature, our own environment?  Instead of planting more trees, we are cutting more and more trees just to fulfill our ever increasing demand for papers.  The papers, 50-60% or may be even more of those going to go in trash someday.

Is it possible to create or even imagine an office where there is no place for paper?  There are no printers, no contract with OfficeMax and other stationery providers.  There are no invoices to be fulfilled for printer inks and there are no technician fixing your broken printer.

There are only SCANNERS and imaging softwares.  And everyone in your office has Adobe Acrobat Professional or similar applications so that you can create and edit these image, pdf, tiff files.  Is it possible to imagine a completely paperless office which we proudly call a GREEN Office?  I am sure it is – the only requirement to create a GREEN office is the willingness to create one, some discipline or may be a little push from top management to do so.

Below are 5 steps I can think right now to create a GREEN Paperless Office:

  1. Think Before you Print: Most of us print emails, documents and all just because we have access to a printer.  But ask yourself next time when you hit print, “Do you absolutely need to print it?”  Email are supposed to be read on screen, why do you need a printed version?  Try to print email, documents and presentations only if it is absolutely necessary.
  2. Preview Before you Hit Print: Most of the time when we print online documents, invoices, web pages, they don’t come out right.  Result – we waste around 2-3 papers because we didn’t preview before printing.  Just by hitting “Preview” before we print, we can at least make sure we are not wasting any extra paper than is necessary.  Make it a habit to preview every time you hit print.
  3. Remove unwanted stuff from your Print: There are many services that lets you remove unwanted stuff out of your prints.  One such service is PrintFriendly that lets you remove unwanted images, text, HTML and ads from the webpages you want to print.  By using these kind of services, you can save paper.
  4. Use Digital Files instead of papers: Many times you can simply print a document to PDF and see how it will look before printing.  Other than that it is much more easier to read a document on PDF then any other application.  If you are printing a document just because your recipient doesn’t have that latest office application – you are wrong.  Because PDF is a universal portable document format which anyone can read and it is free.  Try to use a digital format whenever you can instead of taking a printout of the documents to the meeting.
  5. Use Advanced Technology: We all are habitual to make 5-10 copies of the presentations for meetings so that participants can have them while we are giving the presentation.  We don’t even think that by printing 10 copies of just 10 slides of power point, we are wasting 100 papers.  We could simply email that powerpoint to all the participants and then use LCD projector to share the presentation with everyone live. When everyone is looking at the same thing as you are, why do they need prints.  They don’t.
    Use digital invoicing, online reviews, online meetings and other digital products to reduce your paper usage.

There are many other similar things you can do to save paper.  If you want more ideas, check out this post which I wrote 2 years back.  One thing is sure that if we print only when it is absolutely necessary, we can definitely put a major dent in the paper consumption.

Ultimately it is up to us, if we really want to do something for our nature, our environment.  With faith in the latest technology advancements, the day when the dream for a GREEN PAPERLESS OFFICE comes true is not very distant.  But it won’t happen automatically, we will have to work towards it.  I urge all my Knowliz readers to try to reduce their paper consumption.

I always keep the following in my email signature, “Save paper, save trees, save earth and hence save yourselves.”

If you like my idea of a Green Paperless office, then please help me spread this article on Twitter, Facebook and Digg etc.  And don’t forget to add your comment with your views about the same.

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