Face it, printing costs money. Depending on your printer, toner, paper and other consumables, it can be really expensive to print hardcopies unless they are absolutely necessary. While commercial real estate simply can not operate in a completely paperless environment due to required legal contracts and required reporting, the days of printing without forethought have passed. 

Business as a whole has become leaner and more streamlined and the commercial real estate arena is no exception. Printing requires file cabinets for all those needless papers while printing only those legally required permits smaller file rooms with fewer expensive file cabinets and manpower to file, pull and re-file paper. 

Every email doesn’t need to be printed. Key facts from emails such as contact numbers, website URLs, and lead information can be stored electronically in your email contacts and the actual email can be archived to your hard drive, thumb drive, or placed in a centralized storage location if you feel it really must be saved for reference. 

Because so many projects require two or more people to access files, storage on centralized data banks either online or as part of your intranet can reduce the need for excess printing. Dropbox.com allows large files to be stored in shared directories for access by those users given permission to access and edit them. Google Docs provides a very viable solution for smaller files to be shared, accessed from any computer with internet access by the file owner, as well as others given permission by the owner to edit or view the spreadsheets, presentations or documents. Cloud storage is the latest means of sharing documents. The term simply refers to the cyber cloud of data stored on the internet for access by those given permission.

Receipt scanning devices permit storage of those tiny pieces of paper as electronic data. These inexpensive portable devices easily fit inside a briefcase and connect to a computer via an available USB port so that important business cards and important tax receipts can be stored in an organized manner rather than misplaced or stuffed into a flimsy folder until needed again.

Companies focused on saving environmental resources as well as printing costs no longer allow employees to print and pass around jokes and other non-business data. When something truly needs to be printed, recycled toner and ink cartridges reduce the cost. Using recycled bond paper makes yet another dent in the expenses associated with printing. 

It may seem as if paper printing expenses in the office are not a large expensive, but if you focus on printing responsibly, you will find the savings add up and up quite quickly. You’ll realize time savings and reduction in the tedious task of filing hard copy information that may not be needed again. 

It is great to see large corporations like google embracing Embracing Green.

Find out more by watching the video

Read more on the Google Blog

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Saving money in operating your office is always a plus and there may be ways you can save a lot with little effort that you may not have thought of before. Even small savings add up over time and can really make a difference in your bottom line over the course of a year.  Here are some ways that you may find fit perfectly into your business that make sense for saving dollars:

Print Responsibly: It costs money to print; paper costs money and uses up resources even if you choose recycled paper. Do you print every version of a contract or document, even when you know there will be several more versions before document signed off? You can red-lined and add comments using these functions built into all of today’s word processing software and it is much more efficient than hardcopy and red pen mark ups. It’s even more cost effective using electronic mark up because corrections and changes can be accepted or rejected by the document owner automatically rather than being retyped. Print only those documents needed for maintaining legally required files, customer contracts, and important reference documents you will use often. Any reference document you will only refer to only occasionally should be stored on your computer or network server and accessed as needed. Not only do you save money but also the number of trees being cut for paper products is reduced, reducing your organization’s environment footprint.

Right Source Labor: Overtime for employees is expensive and sometimes really isn’t welcomed by the employee needed for more than 40 hours when projects pop up needing attention. Employee burnout is always a problem and asking for extra hours can add to this problem. Of course, only trusted long-term employees can perform many of the tasks in your business, but temporary or part-time workers can easily do others. Hiring temporary labor from agencies can be nearly as costly as asking your employees to work overtime. Maintain a list of local freelance workers who can be called in for periods where routine tasks must be performed. Examples include preparing mailers and applying mailing labels, entering data into spreadsheets, copying and collating handouts for seminars and presentations, and there are many other tasks you’ll have based on what your firm needs. Often, you will find some of your employees have teens who would love the chance to earn a bit of extra money by working a few hours as needed. You can find temporary staff by posting on Craigslist.org for your area.  A freelance worker working virtually from a location other than your office may easily do some tasks, such as entering data into spreadsheets from another online source. Save expensive overtime costs for when you really need their expertise during extra hours.

Right Size Travel Expenses: Sometimes you simply must travel to attend a meeting or seminar. Perhaps you must visit an important client in another city. But most company travel budgets can be trimmed significantly if technology is used effectively. Invest in good quality video teleconferencing equipment and, for the cost of one or two meetings in another state, you can hold meetings face to face with people around the world forever. The equipment today is affordable and allows people to feel as if you are sitting at the table with them, even if you are in another continent. Even if you do feel a human presence is essential at the client’s site, when you do need to travel you can often reduce the number of people that go on the trip, combining video conferencing with on-site representation. You’ll recoup the investment in any equipment you purchased and the additional savings will amaze you after only a short time.

The use of cubicles in office space can allow more people to work comfortably in a smaller space — 75 square feet, at last count, for the average American office cubicle user.  Using less floor space automatically reduces the resources required for each individual worker, since energy use increases in larger spaces. The lack of walls reduces energy use further, since all the workers in the larger space can share light and heat or air conditioning. Consider the raw materials needed for those walls in the first place, and cubicles are clearly a greener choice.

If you’re thinking of using cubicles in your office for the sake of reducing your carbon footprint, you should take the next logical step and go with used cubicles. Certainly, any time you can reuse rather than buying new, you’re conserving resources. If you can make use of something that would otherwise have to be disposed of, you’ve doubled the benefits: fewer natural resources consumed, and less waste ending up in the landfill.

For cubicles, though, there’s an extra layer, because good quality cubicles are made of steel. Mark Miller, COO of EthoSource, a used furniture company in the Northeast, says that his company chooses Herman Miller cubicles for their refurbished cubicles. “Those things are built like tanks,” says Miller. “They last forever.”

The strength of the steel is matched by the environmental impact of producing new steel:

• Steel manufacturing is always one of the highest energy consumers in countries with a steel industry. In the United States, even with our much smaller steel industry, steel still represents a full 8% of the energy consumption in the manufacturing sector.
• Steel requires iron ore and often scrap metal for recycled steel. While recycling is of course a good thing, recycling scrap metal to produce steel involves extensive processing and creates greenhouse gases – both through the process of producing steel in furnaces and the high energy use required to do so.
• Some of the scrap steel is used up in the production of recycled steel. A single steel cubicle reclaimed for scrap metal will not produce enough new steel to make a new steel cubicle. Considering the loss of raw materials in the process, emissions, and energy use, reuse of steel is unquestionably a more earth friendly choice than recycling.

Fortunately, recovering a used cubicle creates a cubicle that is essentially new: the only parts of the cubicle that are visible to the users are in fact new.

With the substantial savings that used cubicles offer, there is no reason to hesitate to make the green choice when it comes to cubicles.

This post is courtesy of EthoSource