Taking Small Steps Towards a Greener Practice

It is not secret that our business generates a lot of paper. After a numbers of years the sheer quantity of paper generated starts to encroach on our work space. It begins to expand to where the need for additional storage space becomes not only evident but imperative. For our office, that took the form of leasing offsite storage space to house our older files. Now even those spaces are filled and the content continues to grow, pushing the limits of the space. It became clear that we needed to adopt a different tact and we considered simply discarding the oldest files. Purging some of the old files is an obvious solution. But how many times have we thrown out an old project only to receive a call soon after regarding that very job. The client suddenly decides to revise the old design or any number of requests. We have to consider a different way.

In our office we have examined every one of our processes to try and come up with a way to minimize paper use. The industry currently will not stand the complete eradication of paper so the goal is to minimize it whenever possible. For example, we do not throw out old prints; we keep the paper and use the reverse side when making check plots. We do the same with old reports, calculations etc. Using both sides of the paper has reduced our consumption of new paper thereby also reducing costs.

Our most recent and most ambitious goal is to scan all the old drawings and project files, including those that are in storage so that eventually we are able to lease less offsite storage space or eliminate it altogether.

Given the state of the technology and all the on-going innovations, it won’t be long before paper becomes archaic. It won’t be long before construction documents are issued in digital form only. We may as well embrace the future of this technology now and position ourselves accordingly.

Besides, we like the idea of saving trees.