Cutting back your paper use at work (and at home!) may be one of your best opportunities to reduce your personal environmental impact and contribute to our University-wide sustainability outcomes.
Did you know …
- Paper is the largest component of waste in an office
- It takes 24 trees to create just one tonne of virgin office paper*.
A paper-lite office is a work environment that uses minimal physical paper and prioritises digital documents. Here's how you can help your workplace to go paper-lite.
What are the benefits of going paper-lite?
There are numerous benefits to going paper-lite, including the ability to:
- Reduce waste and conserve natural resources (all the steps involved in paper production have significant impacts on the environment)
- Improve document accessibility (and your own productivity while you're at it - spend less time searching for information!)
- Share resources or collaborate with your colleagues more easily
- Ensure your teaching resources are saved and backed up
- Re-use and edit resources from one year to the next
- Enable document security and access tracking, if needed
- Reduce stress (no more hurriedly printing materials before a lecture or meeting)
- Save costs (on ink cartridges, paper and printing devices)
- Save space in your office (ditch the filing cabinet taking up space in the corner of your office!).
7 steps to transition to a paper-lite office
You can transition to a paperless office in 7 easy steps:
- Start with a vision. Get buy-in from top leadership and make sure everyone in the office is on board. This is achieved by ensuring everyone can see the benefits to them individually, as well as the organisation as a whole.
- Audit paper consumption. To understand how to target reduction efforts and how to measure and communicate success, you will need to know how much paper is currently being used and on what applications. You may be able to access your team's paper purchasing information and printer records, or conduct a staff survey to determine how paper is being used in your division.
- Set a deadline. Now that you have a plan and have everyone on board, it’s time to get serious. You will need to define a goal within a reasonable deadline. For e.g., you might say that you aim to have "an 80% reduction in your '2019' paper level by '2021'.
- Digitise. Convert your existing documents from paper to digital. Before you begin the process of going paperless, you also need a plan for what to do with all your existing paper. It’s one thing to move to a paperless work environment for the future, but what about all the old documents you have now? You may want to resource some administrative support to scan existing documents as part of the transition.
- Arm yourself with technology and tools. Going paperless will be much easier if you have the right technology and tools in place to support your efforts. This might also mean offering training for some people, as technology and tools are not optimised if your team don’t feel confident using them.
- Review and digitise your business processes. Ask yourself, are there areas where your team is using paper to get things done when they could just as easily do it electronically?
- Track results over time and celebrate. Maintain momentum by celebrating your little paperless victories along the way.
Paper-lite best practices
Once you've made the shift, here are some ideas to maintain paper-lite momentum in your workplace.
Step 1: Reduce
- Use digital signatures for paperless forms. Digital signatures are increasingly accepted as legally binding. See UQ's tips on how to create a digital signature in Adobe Acrobat DC.
- Update internal procedures. You may have started work on this in your initial 7 steps, but now consider making it a MUST to submit any paper electronically.
- Encourage digital collaboration. Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and associated services form part of a modern collaborative workspace available to UQ staff and students.
- Make your events paperless. Event planning and management tools make paperless events easy! For detailed information on how to hold a sustainable event, check out the Sustainable Events Guide.
- Reduce paper flow with vendors and suppliers. Communicate your goals to your vendors, and enlist their support in switching to electronic solutions such as:
- Electronic order processing
- Paperless invoices and statements for customers
- Electronic invoicing from and payment to vendors
- Internal online routing of documents for approval
- Sharing electronic documents and publications with vendors
- Meetings and lectures. Circulate materials in advance and let participants know you will not provide hard copies.
Step 2: Re-use
- Make simple notebooks. Re-use items such as leftover single-sided printed paper.
- Ask staff to re-use common items. Provide a place to store used folders, files, covers and other similar items, which staff can take as needed.
Step 3: Recycle
- Choose the right paper. Look for a high post-consumer recycled fibre content. See our Sustainable Purchasing Guide - Paper for more information.
- Place paper in the right bins. Look out for the paper wheelie bins for recycling.
Where to go for help
The UQ Library offers workshops in software, research skills, and publishing and research management.
LinkedIn Learning is also one of the largest software and skills training websites and is free for UQ students and staff. It provides courses and video training for key software applications used at UQ including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat DC, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, R, and Python.
For more information on going paper-lite in your UQ workplace, please contact the Sustainability Office.
*Sustainability Victoria, Save paper