Page 136 -

C C h a p t e r 6 : h a p t e r 6 : G G o i n g P a p e r l e s s o i n g P a p e r l e s s 107 107

He probably wouldn’t mind getting it e-mailed to him (it would be faster than sending a paper
copy, even via a messenger service), and if he wants to print it out, let him pay for it.

NOTE Mr. Oberscheimer, the visionary that he is, probably has already adopted his own paperless
office. As such, he’d want to scan the report and e-file it anyway, so you’re actually saving him
time and money. No wonder you became a partner.

Storage
Take a look around your office, and you realize where a lot of paper is hiding. It’s in the
desk drawers, on the shelves, or tucked away in filing cabinets. It may very well be stashed
in a long-term storage location offsite. If you use less paper, you will free up office space
(filing cabinets can be removed) and you’ll save the expense of buying new filing cabinets.
You can compute how much you spend on paper storage by counting the number of
filing cabinets you have. Then, measure how much floor area they occupy. Many filing
2
cabinets have a footprint of 2.5 ft . You might want to double this amount to account for
open drawers. Now, multiply that amount by the value of your floor space, and you’ll see
how much that filing cabinet costs to maintain.

2
NOTE Of course, it could be argued that 2.5 ft of hallway space also costs the same amount. And PART III
don’t even get starting trying to figure out how much money is wasted by the office joker who
squanders company time forwarding off-color e-mails.
What’s inside the filing cabinet is even more expensive. If we assume paper consumes
2000 sheets per foot, and each drawer has 1 foot of file space, then a four-drawer cabinet
could contain 16,000 sheets of paper. It’s probably only at 75 percent capacity, or 12,000
sheets. That equates to 24 reams of paper. At US$2.50 per ream, you have US$60 worth of
paper in that cabinet.
Combining the price for the storage cabinet along with the price of the paper can
indicate to you how much it costs to store paperwork. If you store paperwork offsite, you
know exactly how much that monthly bill comes to.
Admittedly, the cost may not look that big. However, like so many other elements of
Green IT, when you start adding up all these little costs, the total gets to be pretty large.

Destruction
Most paper winds up in the trash, usually within a few years of its first being produced.
And for each piece of paper that goes into the trash, you pay with your pocketbook, and the
environment pays in deleterious ways. Plus, if you shred sensitive documents, the shredder
adds expense in the form of worker time, along with electricity consumed.

NOTE That price only goes up if you hire someone to take your documents and shred them for you.
Offsite shredding costs can be as much as US$500 per ton.

In the U.S., about 200 million tons of regular solid waste is generated annually, with
about 2 percent of that being paper. Landfill prices vary, but US$50 per ton is a typical fee.
Landfilling paper costs, therefore, about US$100 million per year.