Join the TechSoup Reduce Paper Use Campaign!

During the month of November, TechSoup's GreenTech Initiative is hosting a campaign to drive down paper use in nonprofits and libraries. The centerpiece of the campaign is the Reduce Paper Use Challenge — five concrete recommendations on things your organization can do to reduce your use of paper.

We will publish articles and provide tips that provide guidance and tools on how to make concrete changes and we will also hold online events, like a webinar on November 18 and online discussions on November 12 and throughout the month, so that you can communicate directly with experts in this field and also the growing community of people working in nonprofits and libraries who are interested in greening their organizations.

The first thing you can do to start is to take a few moments to take our baseline survey. This will help us understand the starting point of where most organizations are at when it comes to their current paper usage and changes that have already been made internally to reduce waste.

After the campaign, we’ll invite you to send us your brief story on how you reduced your paper usage in your office, and do a short post-survey. Participants will be eligible to win a free MyFax account for 5 years so that you can send and receive electronic faxes, further reducing your paper usage. MyFax is an online fax to email service in which you can send and receive faxes from up to 5 email addresses. It also works with your current fax machine and fax number. This is a $120 value per year for a total value of $600. You must take both surveys to be eligible to win.

Why are we doing this? The reason for this challenge is that there is massive and unnecessary waste in the area of paper and nonprofits have been contributing to that waste for far too long. According to the U.S. EPA, paper and paperboard are the largest components of municipal solid waste — 34% of the U.S. waste stream. This pattern is consistent in many countries of the world. About half the trees cut down in North America annually are used for making paper and more than 90% of the printing and writing paper made in the U.S. is from virgin tree fiber. A typical business office generates about 1.5 pounds of wastepaper per employee per day.

At TechSoup we focusing our efforts to reduce our paper use internally, and have been surprised at how easy it is, and also how much cost savings it yields. It's one of the easiest, highest impact ways to green up your office and save money.

With that in mind, we want your nonprofit to make 5 changes. Here is our reduce paper use challenge:

1. Complete a paper use assessment of your organization and communicate results to your staff. If possible, negotiate and set reduced paper usage quotas for departments and/or individuals. Here is a simple example of a  checklist:

• Calculate how much office paper, marketing paper, and janitorial paper you buy (and use) each month
• Estimate what percentage of at least 30% recycled content paper you are currently buying
• Estimate how much paper is going through your printers, fax, and copiers, and which of them already duplex prints (prints double-sided)
• Identify the people and/or programs that use the most paper
• Does your organization store documents electronically in a way that everyone can share them?
• Identify your marketing materials that you are digitizing (making in to PDF files)
• Determine the percentage of paper you currently recycle

2. Change printer and copier settings and habits.

• Set narrow margins in all standard documents to be printed
• Equip all printers and copiers to be able to duplex (double-sided print), set duplexing as a default on all computers and printers, train staff in how to use duplex print.
• Install utilities and train staff in techniques to print just what is needed. For example to avoid printing long email threads when just a couple of paragraphs are needed.

3. Create, edit, communicate and store documents electronically.

• Send and receive electronic faxes or fax-to-emails instead of paper faxes
• Set up scanners to convert paper documents into electronic documents that can be searched and shared more rapidly and easily.
• Set up PDF software on all computers for creating electronic documents.
• Set up a means of storing documents electronically instead of in filing cabinets. Saves space and makes it easier to locate documents with a search feature.
• Select and use on-screen editing tools in your electronic documents.
• Budget for multi-function or all-in-one machines. These will save on space, costs, energy and toxic production and end-of-life processes.
• Setup trainings and encourage use of these tools

4. Distribute annual reports and marketing collateral in PDFs, HTML or eBooks.

• Check your Web site to see what pages people most often print, print them yourself, and change them if they are printing on too many pages unnecessarily.

5. Budget for and start buying recycled content paper.

• It won't make much of a cost difference and it will save the potential of millions of trees annually.

Check back each week of November on GreenTech to find new tips and articles on paperless faxing, printing utilities, using online documents, and be sure to participate in our online forum event on November 12 and our webinar on November 18.

We don't expect you to be able to make all of these changes in one month or even in one year, but we want to help get you started. Some of them are easy, like buying recycled content paper and some can be more complex. Don't get overwhelmed. Select one of the items from the list and just do it. There will be hurdles, but we are here to help you overcome them. We hope that you like our first GreenTech campaign and hope that by making these changes we can all make a difference to the planet and also to our organizations' bottom lines.