I happened by one of my Chris Brogan’s blog and noticed a pretty little “ECO-SAFE” badge in his side bar. I had the options to “Send the page to email,” “email a PDF,” or “save as a PDF.” What a brilliant idea! So of course, you will not find this option on my side bar!

I keep my own documents stored on my hard drive in PDF format as much as possible. One of my most proud undertakings this year was to set up my office with an electronic document server to cut down on both the waste my office produces and the stacks, boxes, and cabinets filled to the brim with paper. The more minimalistic way of life that seems to be increasing in popularity leads to environmental benefits in more ways than we have yet realized. Don’t want to have that big, ugly file cabinet in the corner of your office? Scan everything to PDF and use a document management system! I’m using the uber-powerful Microsoft Sharepoint at my office but recommend Paperport to home users.

Cutting down on the paper you consume is the next step to recycling. First, we’ve learned how to recycle, now we learn now to produce fewer materials that need recycling.

And if you have a website, try out one of ECO-Safe’s Merit Badges. They come in three graphically pleasing designs. The one in my sidebar is likely to be their most popular option. There is also a horizontal-type…

And this beautiful fully-graphical one.

Why is this such a big deal? You can read all about it on Eco-Safe’s website. Here are some quick figures from Eco-Safe, but be sure to visit them to read all of their great reasons to go electronic PDF!

“American’s throw away 85% of office paper, which means out of everything you print, more than 4 out of 5 pages, will go right into the trash. By not printing things that you will eventually throw away, you simply save trees. Each year the average American uses 2 trees worth of paper products (one tree makes roughly 8,400 sheets of copy paper). So if you were to only use copy paper and no other paper products, out of the 16,800 sheets of paper that you print on, you will throw away 13,440 of them. When you multiply that by the number of internet users worldwide the numbers are absolutely staggering. ”

Wishing you the best of luck, Eco-Safe!

And please…

• print as little as possible,
• use the back side of un-needed prints as scratch paper (especially when printing for your eyes only)
• recycle all paper, including junk mail
• use electronic documents, like PDFs, whenever possible.

Related Posts:

• Big Screen to Big Green
• Austin’s Single Stream Recycling Is Almost Here
• Recycled Material Chandeliers
• Is Google Taking Over The World?
• Keeping Austin Green This Summer

Tags: environment, green, recycling, web 2.0 //