document-imaging.paperless-office.2
- 1. The Clean, Green Desk: How Going Paperless Can Positively Impact Your Office and the Planet Paper has dominated our workplaces for decades. Its use typically takes the form of printed reports, forms, invoices, faxes, contacts, and files. However, the exhaustive consumption of paper in our offices caused significant detriment to our planet. Luckily, there are ways to make our offices more sustainable. Many of these solutions focus on idea of becoming a “Paperless Office”—an office that eliminates, or greatly minimises, the use of paper through use of modern technology. In a Paperless Office, hard-copy files are replaced by digital files through digitisation technology. By digitising documents, companies benefit from increased: document security, data storage capacity, ease-of-access, file-sharing and data transfer, and information management. All while reducing paper’s financial burden on the company and its environmental burden on our planet. Compu-Stor’s Document Imaging services can help your workplace achieve this sustainability goal and begin to reap the benefits of going digital. From Trees to Seas: How Paper Production Effects Our Planet Global paper consumption has grown 400% in the past 40 years. In 2013, paper consumption reached an international average of 57kg of paper per person per annum. But where does all that paper come from? Currently, 40% of the timber taken from harvested trees goes towards paper manufacturing. This amounts to 4 billion trees, which is enough to circle the equator 5 times, each year. It has become evident that paper production is exhausting a precious, limited resource: trees. Deforestation, or the permanent removal of forests and tree stands, is often used to harvest trees for human consumption. This practice has gained unprecedented attention in recent decades because of its impact on the landscape and ecology of deforested areas. Deforestation has dramatically altered forests around the world, including old-growth forests in Australia and New Zealand. Timber for paper production may also come from plantation forests, which pose similar, albeit less obvious, ecological problems. Plantation forests are a single-species, or
- 2. monoculture, agricultural practice which may generate ecological imbalances within the environment surrounding the plantation. Unfortunately, the problems generated by paper use don’t stop with the collection of raw materials. The paper production process itself is a major source of environmental pollutants, which find their way into our air and water, and in some cases, our bodies. The main gases emitted during the paper manufacturing process are responsible for acid rain and contribute to climate change. Furthermore, the discharges from pulp and paper mills contain dissolved organic materials that can dramatically alter the ecology of the water systems they infiltrate. Such ecological changes can cause harmful algal blooms, discolour waterways, and even kill off important larger organisms, such as fish, birds and mammals. When certain fat-soluble chemicals from the paper production process make their way into the environment, they may also their way up the food chain and onto our dinner plates. One such group of chemicals, known as dioxins, are produced when paper pulp is bleached. Dioxins are highly toxic, carcinogenic compounds which have been shown to cause reproductive, developmental, immune system, and hormone problems in humans. Recycling does help reduce our paper consumption. However, it cannot fix all of the problems associated with paper use. Recycling paper is still more expensive than producing new sheets. Moreover, the process of de-inking paper for reuse generates a slurry of chemical wastes that get deposited back into landfills. Ultimately, you just can’t win with paper! Fortunately, there is hope. Going paperless can take your business out of the expensive loop of consumption that paper-based offices generate. All you need to do is digitise. How Document Imaging Can Help Solve the Paper Problem With Compu-Stor’s help, going paperless is an achievable goal for any business. Our wide variety of document imaging and digitisation services can convert all of your paper-based records to digital format. In addition to ‘greening’ their businesses, our customers have benefitted from the increased efficiency, security, storage space, and ease-of-access digitising their records provides. Going digital has also helped our customers save heaps on the operational costs associated with print-based data management. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), digitising your workplace can yield potential savings of up to 10 times the purchasing cost of paper, by reducing the costs of storage, toner, printing, labour, postage, and disposal. Now those are numbers your accountants will want to crunch! Our scanning and imaging services can be tailored to meet the individual needs of our customers. We can tackle high-volume document conversion projects and are able to return
- 3. your digitised files on DVD, USB, or HDD media. Furthermore, Compu-Stor’s scanners are capable of converting hard-copy documents in a variety of sizes (up to A0), in 100 dpi to over 600 dpi, and in your choice of black and white, greyscale, or high-quality colour. To provide further support in the switch to a paperless office, we have developed user- friendly online storage solutions for the management of our customers’ digital records. Once your documents have been scanned into a digital format by our imaging technicians, we can link them to our Complete Information Management System (CIMS) for secure online storage. CIMS is a state-of-the-art online database that lets our customers remotely access their digitised records from anywhere in the world. Our system makes file transfer, data storage, and records management simple and secure. No paper necessary! We’ve used document digitisation to dramatically reduce our paper use and have increased our productivity in the process! Compu-Stor sales representatives at our Sydney, Perth or Melbourne locations would be happy to help your business reduce its environmental impact by going digital, too. We’re all in this together!