Another Earth Day has come and gone. Many of us planted a tree, picked up garbage in the park, made a pact to recycle, baked cupcakes in the shape of trees and made a promise to put an effort on sustainability.
One of the things you may have vowed to do is to reduce the amount of paper that you use in the office. According to PaperKarma, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year – That’s 4-million tons of paper used every year. With that in mind, dedicating yourself to doing a little less printing is a great goal.
A document management solution implemented with your ERP system, like Microsoft Dynamics, can help you fulfill your paperless promise. According to the Paperless Project, “If putting information at your fingertips is half the beauty of document management, the other half is that you can eliminate the need for filing the paper you print.”
Rather than storing copies in a filing cabinet where they may never see a recycling bin, document management allows you to simply scan paper documents into a computer system, and then recycle the paper copy that you no longer need.
The Recycling Revolution found that each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.
So take a look at your filing room. How many trees could you save by scanning old documents into a document management solution and recycling? How many could you preemptively save by requesting electronic copies of documents to be stored in your document management solution in the future? Document management makes it easy to celebrate Earth Day every day.