Daily Tip: Go Paperless
Okay, so you probably won’t be 100% paper-free just yet, but there are several things you can do to eliminate a lot of uncessary paper in your life. It is as easy as making a few phone calls and moving online.
Pay bills online. Credit card companies and utility providers encourage their customers to manage their accounts and pay bills online. Sure this makes it easier for them - less postage, and overhead costs - but you’ll also benefit and shred a lot less paper.
Read newspapers and magazines online. Many publications have their print edition available online for subscribers. Same info, less paper.
Stop junk mail. To make credit card offers, catalogs, direct mailings and all the rest of that junk disappear follow Rebecca’s Daily Tip on how to do this.
At work, utilize e-mail.
- Circulate memos and other interoffice communications via e-mail.
- Send and receive faxes electronically.
- Create electronic versions for major documents such as annual reports.
- Don’t print unless you have to.
Amy says: The hardest thing for me on this list is stopping junk mail. I’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do to prevent it, but it just keeps coming and coming. It seems like a never ending battle, but I’m going to fight until the bitter end.
Here are more Daily Tips from GO on going paperless:
Daily Tip: Click This, Tax Man!
Daily Tip: Electronic Faxes Save the Day
Daily Tip: Don’t Press That Button!
Daily Tip: Your Bills Will (Virtually) Disappear
Daily Tip: Find Zen. Live Sans Flyers
Daily Tip: War on Junk Mail
Daily Tip: Please Mister Postman, No More Junk Mail!
Daily Tip: Freedom From Catalogs
Daily Tip: Get yer Programs!
Daily Tip: Save a Tree, Read it Online
Tags: Daily Tips, junk mail, paper, recycle
- Uncategorized
August 7th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Nice article.
For the technically-minded, you might like to explore making your personal record keeping totally paperless. Here’s an article that talks about it in great detail. Particularly useful for those few documents that you can’t prevent being delivered.
The author talks about Perforce, but I prefer Subversion (SVN) and TortoiseSVN (an excellent client) running on my Windows XP desktop at home. I use
VueScan to scan the paperwork directly into PDF format. This system has enabled me to transform a 2-drawer suspended-file cabinet into a small A4 box-file (with room to grow).
August 7th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I don’t think this is going in the right direction. One of the main problems I see with this culture is that is completely disposable. Everything happens at such a frantic rate, not much is every really absorbed. I believe that the digitizing of life is, in part, to blame for this.
Most of our correspondence and communication is now forever lost (baring the continuation of the internet storage eternally.) Where there were once records of our thoughts in the form of letters to friends, we now how deleted or forgotten email, blogs, and the like.
We are able to live feed as many news sites as possible and ingest a dizzying amount of information. To what gain? Are we more compassionate to our neighbors because we have ingested more disconnected information in an hour than those of past generations ingested through their whole life time?
So I don’t believe the answer is to “go paperless.” Perhaps if we had less, but had higher quality. Consider the pen. Pens were once an item to be proud of. The production of a pen was considered with artful presentation of the box and instructions. You took care of your pen. It meant something. Now we have bags of pens, boxes of pencils, of which hold zero value. The same is true of paper. We have too much paper. We get and throw it away excessively. Perhaps we should not try to completely sterilize our lives of paper, but rather, to pay a little more attention to it. Use it more intentionally.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
How would you propose to deal with it then? Every household gets tons of paper in the mail each year. This is solicited and unsolicited. I would rather go paperless on things like bills and my bank statements so I can redirect that to purchasing good books.
Currently, I get one newspaper delivered and one magazine. Everything else is available online.
The newspaper is my local regional newspaper which doesn’t have a very good website. Their website only shows an average of 10 stories per day and nothing about upcoming events, local groups or community feedback. The majority of the website is just a vehicle to sell more classified ads, which rarely interest me. It also provides me newspaper resources to use in my garden and around the house if needed. Most is recycled weekly though.
The magazine is Sunset Magazine. They don’t offer the entire version on their website either and once they do, I will switch to a digital only version.
The only thing that comes in my mailbox are Netflix movies (renting from them is less wasteful than buying) and local junkmail advertisements that don’t have a list to get off of. It makes it less likely that I’ll miss a card mailed to me or something else because we go through the mail every day. All my bills are received and paid electronically.
Cutting paper out of your life doesn’t have any affect on how you deal with your neighbors or family and instant communication via the Internet can bring families closer. For instance, I built my family an online photo gallery similar to photobucket where we can share pictures for no cost. We talk more via cellphone and instant messennger because we all have different schedules and those are mobile so they go anywhere we do. Storing letters on my computer allows me to keep them longer with little damage to the environment. Same with pictures. I take more pictures and waste less with my digital camera than I would ever think about with a traditional film camera.
For the quantity vs. quality argument. There is still quality and you can get it. I don’t have bags of pens or pencils. I have a pen and a pencil that I use when I need to. It has been that way most of my life. I don’t use post-it notes because I use Microsoft One Note which gives me the same benefit. I recycle what paper we use (not very much) so that we can purchase good quality books to enjoy as a family. Only you have the power to reduce in your life.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:32 am
[...] We need to stop wasting paper, and Green Options has a few suggestions. For example, stop paying for print news when you can read it online for [...]