Is a Paperless Office Realistic?
It seems with increasing environmental disasters, marked climate change and the media buzz resulting from the release of An Inconvenient Truth, that environmental consciousness has risen to an all-time high in North America. While lots of us do our part at home i.e. by recycling, composting and unplugging unused electrical items, more could be done at the workplace.
I found a write-up on this issue in this week’s Globe and Mail, which noted an astounding claim by GreenPrint Technologies (a company that sells software to eliminate unnecessary pages before printing), that Americans use enough sheets of paper each year to build a ten-foot high wall that would stretch from New York to Tokyo and beyond.
Despite the 20th Century predictions of a paperless office, it seems we are far from achieving that goal, particularly in the legal arena where people may be more fearful of relying solely on computer systems to store important documents, and where hard copies of file materials are often required to conduct our practice.
I wonder whether a truly paperless office is realistic given the nature of our work. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to significantly reduce our paper usage. A start may be to send e-mails ending with a message along the lines of “Print only when necessary”, which environmentalists reportedly say have real value. Other options are to cut down on extending e-mail trails and to avoid sending written communications in multiple forms.
Have a great weekend,
Natalia
