Happy New Year and Paper Savings

Let's hope thie new year is filled with good news. Here is an article written by some IT consultants that makes a few good points on paper savings ion the office:

... WaMu now has a total of 2.7 million customers using its e-statements. The savings on paper itself as well as postage and "handling the paper," Horvath says, is approximately $18 million a year.

"We're going to continue to drive this hard," Horvath adds. "If we can take it from 2.7 million, currently, and add another 3 million this year, then our savings will be closer to $36 million in 2009."

...

"If we could reduce the amount of paper that we utilize, we would save enough money to then consider buying paper that was more environmentally friendly," Horvath says. "And if the paper is more expensive, it still might be a net reduction [in cost] because we've reduced our volume" of paper consumption.

WaMu's legal department, for instance, had been the company's biggest consumer of paper. IT already had reduced the legal department's use of dedicated printers and moved the group to multifaceted printer-copier-fax machines, which saved on paper-related costs. "We then asked them to go to duplex printing," she says, which is printing on both sides of a piece of paper. "And then we asked them to think twice about all the things they're printing."

In a short time, Horvath reports that the legal department had reduced its paper usage by 15%. From the legal department pilot, plans are now underway to replicate the program throughout the rest of WaMu's operations. Even just a 5% reduction in paper usage spread out across the rest of the bank's operations would make moving to more environmentally friendly paper, which can be more expensive, "quite easy to justify," Horvath notes.

We at Paper Planet Blog shouldn't endorse company activities from afar, but it seems from the article WaMu might be on to something here. These are similar messages to what we are promoting at the Shrink! project.