RE: [greenyes] Paperless Office

["Amy Bauman" <abauman@no.address>]

Paperless OfficeHi Bruce

I had a lot of success cutting paper usage once we developed an intranet
(internal web) that would store electronic copies of project documents.
This doesn't stop people from printing it out, obviously, but it at least
presents an opportunity to save it locally and read it on line.  Mostly it
saves TIME, and that's a good way to approach  the campaign.

Ultimately, we hired Filenet to come in and scan a lot of our records, which
were then stored on the intranet.  This too presents some challenges, as the
indexing capabilities at the time (granted, this was about 8 years ago) was
lacking.  In the end, once you go electronic, little things like document
naming conventions and filing conventions become a lot more important, as
does server redundancy.

One viewpoint I ran across -- the tradeoff of paper consumption vs. the
additional bleach needed to whiten double-sided print for recycling.  I
never calculated the environmental impact of additional bleach (and kept on
printing memo's on the back of old documents crossed out, much to the
amusement of my co-workers), but I'd be interested to hear comments on that.

Good luck!!

Amy Bauman
greenGoat
  -----Original Message-----
  From: Maine, Bruce [mailto:Bruce.Maine@no.address]
  Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 9:16 AM
  To: GreenYes
  Subject: [greenyes] Paperless Office


  Good morning.
  Although we've done well at paper recycling and purchasing
recycled-content paper I would like to pursue more paper-reduction
strategies for out offices.  We've implemented policies like double-siding
printing and issuing plans and specifications on CDs but that hasn't seemed
to slow our paper consumption.  Has anyone on the list have any
recommendations or success stories they can share?

  Thanks in advance.
  Bruce Maine
  Sustainable Specifications & Materials Manager
  LEED Accredited Professional
  HDR Architecture
  402.399.1198
  bmaine@no.address
  http://www.hdrgreen.com