How to Go Green in an Office Environment

Whether you are looking to successfully achieve more eco-friendly business practices across the board or are just looking for a way to reduce costs, going green can benefit your company. Today, more and more companies are looking to transition over to more sustainable practices. When it comes to content management, there are many changes that you can make that will reduce your environmental impact.

Switch Over to Digital Office Practices
Going digital is always going to be eco-friendly for one huge reason: you are reducing your use and dependence on paper goods. When you skip using paper, you reduce your carbon footprint because you don’t rely on trees or the fuel needed to ship paper from one place to another. Plus, old hardcopies of files tend to wind up in landfills when they are eventually put out of use. Oh, and paper and toner cost a lot, too – you might want to think about that.

Take a Look at Your Office Tools
What tools does your office use on a daily basis? Many companies have many inefficient machines including copiers, printers, scanners and fax machines. You can reduce your energy dependence simply by switching to ENERGY STAR models. Also when you aren’t using your office tools, it’s important to unplug them. Many people don’t realize that technology still zaps energy even when it isn’t actively used. Switching to solid ink technology, rather than paper, ink, and toner, can reduce the amount of waste your company generates that can’t be recycled or re-used.

Document Management is Eco-Friendly
Of course, your business likely relies on documents and files, and there is no way to stop producing them. However, when you stop storing physical files and content and turn to organizing them electronically, you will stop racking up boxes and boxes of paper. Just the practice of scanning documents alone can immediately start reducing costs and streamlining operations!

When you scan documents and upload them to a content or document management system, this will significantly cut down on your company’s paper dependence. Also, you will save massive amounts of time and energy that used to be dedicated to organizing and archiving documents. Instead, you will be able to organize, archive and back up documents with just a few clicks of a mouse.