April 22 is the 44th anniversary of Earth Day and companies and consumers worldwide are preparing to celebrate ways and protect our planet. Is your company taking part this year? Most companies today have green policies in place. But even so, this Earth Day why not go the extra mile? Why not go paperless for the day?
Go greener. Go paperless. Do you know how much paper your office uses in a year? The average might surprise you. According to the Go Paperless website, last year the average office worker in North America printed more than 10,000 pages of paper. Just one worker! Now multiply that by the number of workers in your print environment and you can see that you are consuming a lot of paper per year. And that’s a lot of trees.
Worse, according to MPS Insights, the lifespan of each printed page is only about 5 minutes or less. (Hopefully that page got recycled, but who can say for sure.) This really begs the question of whether or not that page really needed to be printed. It seems to be a lot a waste for very little use. And it’s another reason to go paperless for a day this Earth Day.
How Much Waste is in Your Company? How many printers are in your organization? How many users? With so much printing and discarding going on, do you have any idea how many pounds of wasted paper your organization is responsible for? Don’t feel bad. Just one laser printer, on average, produces over 100 pounds of wasted paper. Think of how many printers there are worldwide. If each were to go paperless for a day, we would save a lot of resources for mother Earth.
Keep a Close Eye and See Big Improvements. Once solution to paper waste is to let people know that printers are being monitored. According to Print Audit, there is a significant decline in the amount of printing (and paper use) when employees know that their printing behavior is being kept in check. Some report up to 10% savings in paper and resources. All for letting people know that the printers are being monitored.
Happy Earth Day! Whatever green policies your company implements, it’s easy to make even some slight improvements. Going paperless for a day is can actually become a fun contest in the office this Earth Day. Good luck.
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