Is there an environmental benefit to scanning our documents?

We’ve used paper for thousands of years, we’re not going to give up now; right? Some of the most important moments of our life are recorded on paper. Our birth, marriage and death certificate are all paper form. Important transactions such as signing the deeds to your new property or voting in a general election are all legacy paper based processes. We still send 58M letters in the UK every day, most of us still receive paper based invoices and pay slips and how many of us really sign up for electronic statements from our banks.

Most businesses big and small still use paper for some of their most crucial business processes, many still file and store (or sub contract the storage) documents in large quantities often much longer than is absolutely necessary. Aside from the operational efficiencies derived from “scan to process” and the obvious cost savings to be gained from reducing the “Paper Mountains” is there really a positive environmental impact to be gained from scanning paper?

Well clearly had we not of created the documents in the first place there would be no need to scan them, but as mentioned it’s almost impossible to change the delinquent habits learned over thousands of years.

The environmental benefits are there, it’s all about “breaking the cycle” or “truncating the paper process”, in simple terms it’s more of a philosophical argument. The earlier in the process we can capture paper the less likely it is to be copied aimlessly for distribution. The best way to get over the dependency on paper is to eliminate it as quickly as possible, we need to change the way we work. Creating a new business philosophy is no easy task. Making it unacceptable to use a printer is not realistic for most businesses, but by providing employees with small desktop scanners and encouraging them to scan rather than print is laying the foundations for reducing your environmental footprint. By reducing the amount we print we are positively affecting the environment as follows:

a)    We use less (expensive) ink and toner, aside from the noxious chemicals in these products the actual cartridge is nearly always made from plastic. A significant amount of oil is used to produce these cartridges and even though a lot can now be recycled still every year hundreds of millions of cartridges go to landfill.

b)    We can hugely reduce the amount of paper we use. How often do we print documents only to throw them away the same day?

c)    Printers use a lot of energy.

Paper consumption

Research has suggested that the average worker prints six wasted pages per day, equating to 1,410 wasted pages per year which for a 10,000 employee organisation would equate to over 1,500 trees. (Xerox - Creating Sustainable Value)

The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years. (www.thegoodhuman.com)

Though paper recovery rates in the US have increased in recent years, paper still represents one of the biggest components of solid waste in landfills – 26 million tons (or 16% of landfill solid waste) in 2009. When paper decomposes in a landfill, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year. (PricewaterhouseCoopers)

We throw away 45% of our print outs within 24 hours. (Taevs, Debra. “Recycling’s Pushed ‘Reduce, Reuse’ Out of Equation.” Portland Metro Sustainable Industries Journal.)

Consumption of Tree’s

One tree yields 8,333 sheets of paper or 500 sheets (one ream) = 6% of a tree! (www.conservatree.com)
40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper, and this is expected to reach 50% in the near future. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

Nearly 4 billion trees worldwide are cut down each year for paper, representing about 35 percent of all harvested trees. (http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/10/paper-chase/)

Energy consumption

Paper production is the third most energy-intensive of all manufacturing industries, using over 12% of all energy in the industrial sector. The paper and pulp industry is also the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the manufacturing sector. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months) (http://calculator.environmentalpaper.org/home)

Water consumption

Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can. (Clean Technologies in U.S. Industries: Focus on the Pulp and Paper Industry." United States-Asia Environmental Partnership, September 1997)

The water footprint of printing and writing paper is estimated to be between 300 and 2600 m3/ton (2-13 litres for an A4 sheet). (The green and blue water footprint of paper products: Methodological considerations and quantification by P.R. van Oel and A.Y. Hoekstra July 2010)

So, yes there is an environmental impact to scanning and removing paper as early as possible in the process. Scanning and managing our documents electronically is not just about saving money or improving our productivity it is also an essential component to a  very viable green strategy!

The truth about paper

As inventions go it has to be said that paper was one of the better ones. Whoever you decide to credit, whether the ancient Egyptians (Papyrus) or the Chinese chap T’sai Lun, who fabricated a sheaf more representative of what we have today, they could never have known how enduring it’s become never mind how prolific.

According to Wikipedia paper consumption has increased by 400% in the last 40 years and at the same time the world has gone into technological overdrive. So despite all of these technological advancements, including the dawn of new media and the digital age it seems that we’re still totally addicted to paper.

So what is it that we love so much about paper? Is it the way it feels? Is it the way it reads? Or maybe it’s just the best way to present information. Maybe we prefer something tangible or perhaps despite our technological advancements we haven’t been able to come up with anything better.

Sure we have electric paper and yes the Kindle, the iPad and other eReaders have resulted in less books being sold, although the book is doing much better than the CD in the digital age! The US book market only declined by only 2.5% in 2011 even though eBook sales grew by 31%. Bizarrely in the UK paper books incur no VAT whereas eBooks attract the highest rate of tax at 20%, this is hard to imagine given that paper is so environmentally damaging to manufacture and also incurs considerable logistics to transport.

There’s no doubt that we send a heck of a lot of e-mails but certainly any talk prophesising the demise of our mail services is greatly exaggerated. Whilst letter volumes have decreased by 6% since 2011 the Royal Mail still deliver more than 58M letters every day! Some believe that snail mail will outlive email particularly given that many of the next generation use social media to communicate; perhaps many of them will never even have the need for an email address. Just like texting is replacing the phone call, (imagines a world where we don’t talk to each other anymore) it appears that tweeting and instant messaging is replacing e-mail.

And that’s the conundrum for businesses; paper will remain an essential medium of communication containing hugely important content. Paper is expensive to retain, maintain, action or refer back to. Those businesses that implement capture solutions extracting valuable information and expediting important business processes can now react quicker than their competitors but they can also secure valuable prizes with reduced or redeployed headcount and efficiencies that can include; for example, early payment discounts. Once confidence is gained many business also remove the costs of paper storage by secure disposal, hey most new offices don’t have room for rows of filing cabinets.

Back to the longevity of paper, amazingly the University of Cambridge has even developed a laser which can remove toner that has already been fused on the page, a sort of “do it yourself” attempt at recycling which although missing the point by the proverbial “country mile” is still an ingenious achievement, but once again begs the question why can’t we just print less?

My belief is that toner and ink are the real “black gold” and that the influence of their purveyors,  inspired by the invention of Gutenborg  and growing fat on huge profits will lobby hard for the virtues of print and paper consumption will ultimately prevail. I’d hazard a guess that printer ink is more expensive than oil!! Did you ever wonder why when printing your boarding card that it is followed like some kind of unstoppable paper flood with page after page of useless information or that when you print web content that the “print preview function” is totally disregarded and the result is a smorgasbord of content over far too many pages.

The futurists may yearn for new media to finally deliver the “holy grail” that is the “paperless office” but given that technology appears not to be reducing paper consumption greatly perhaps the “less paper office” is now the real prize.  

Environmentalists quite rightly bang the drum of de-forestation and pull on our heart strings with pictures of cuddly animals going extinct, articles that get picked up and covered in everything from the red tops to the broadsheets like some kind of ironic parody.  The truth is that the production of paper requires not only shaving the face of the earth of indispensable trees but also requires vast quantities of fresh drinking water in locations where the need is obviously greater for the indigenous people.

And of course paper production is an intensive process driven by the polluting filth of heavy machinery spoiling some of the most beautiful and previously untouched parts of the world, displacing previously undiscovered peoples like some modern day industrial revolution.

The realists see a world where paper will always have a place, changing habits that have been learned over thousands of years is no small task. New generations will learn about the increased productivity from truncating the paper process (by scanning and capturing an electronic image) and as our dwellings reduce in size people will begrudge the storage room required to house our life on paper.  Let’s be pragmatic and realise that the “paperless office” is a mirage, we cannot totally replace the best form of media ever invented but we can control how prolific it could become.

And the shareholders of large printer companies surely have nothing to fear in the short term, it’s just a shame that the relatives of Mr. Lun or for that matter those of Gutenborg were not afforded a small royalty based on the discoveries of their ancestors as they surely would be competing to be some of the wealthiest people that ever lived.

Welcome to my blog! This is certainly not something that I ever thought I would do, I’m not even sure why I’ve chosen to share my thoughts with cyberspace, not that I expect too many people to stumble upon this blog. I read recently that there are that there were more than 2.2 billion internet users so who knows some of you may find your way here. If you do rock up here you’ll find that this blog is not my life serialised (at least that’s not my intention) but hopefully a forum for me to share my thoughts and musing on all types of things, although the industry I work within will probably feature regularly. Anyway, back to setting this site up, you would think that this would come second nature to someone from within the technology industry!