Going Paperless: Consequences and Benefits

Did you know that one tree provides oxygen for 3 people? And how do we say thank you? By producing more than 300 million tons of paper each year, worldwide. In numbers, that is more than 60% of totally 17 billion cubic feet of harvested timber. And not only that, the paper industry uses more water to make one ton of its product than any other, that is – 2.6 gallons of water to produce 1 sheet of paper. One sheet only!

Now, take a look at your desk and count every paper sheet on it. Don’t forget your drawers (Each four-drawer file cabinet holds an average of 10,000 to 12,000 documents!).

Feeling sad and guilty yet?

So, what ever happened to so called “paperless society” that information scientist Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster envisioned in 1978? With the rise of computers and all that paperless technology we invented so far, business owners should be able to significantly decrease their environmental footprint. But, it is not happening fast enough – 70% of businesses would fail within one month if they suffered a loss of its paper-based records and the paper in the average business even grows by 22% each year!

And why is it so, is a mystery to us.

An average office worker uses somewhere round 10,000 sheets of copy paper annually, and 45% of it just ends up in a trash bin. Stop counting, it’s more than trillion sheets of paper each year!
Going paperless saves a lot of money, time and space. Information sharing is way easier and more secure. Not to mention guarantied increase of productivity – as going digital saves an employee from unnecessary workflow steps (roughly, around 30 to 40% of his time is spent in search for a document locked in email or a drawer).

Not going paperless sounds pretty dumb, wouldn’t you agree? Even tragic when we count in deforestation, man-made climate change, and greenhouse gases.

So, our recommendation… wait, no, our plea and demand even is GO GREEN, GO PAPERLESS. Simply go TeoDesk and problem solved. It’s as easy as that.