Paperwork is still being generated in this digital age. In the US, 30 billion documents are printed annually, Kevin Lynch, vice president of document services for Adobe, told TriplePundit. Here are a few more staggering facts:
- The average U.S. office worker generates about two pounds of paper and paperboard products daily.
- About 90 percent of all office waste is paper.
- Approximately 500 paper documents are signed by the average authorized employee annually.
Much of the paper waste generated in U.S. offices can be eliminated. A document created, signed, shared and stored in Adobe Document Cloud has 91 percent less of an environmental footprint than it would if it were printed, and it has a cost savings of over 90 percent.
Sometimes all it takes is for a customer to see the impact of his or her choices — in this case: how much water, waste and wood they will save by not printing. GreenMeter for Document Cloud allows customers to enter in the amount of paper they would normally print and see how much water, waste and wood they’d save by not printing. For example, a business that reduced printing by 10,000 documents would save 11,427 gallons of water, 961 pounds of waste and 3,725 pounds of wood.
KLM saved 1 million sheets of paper, which translates into 120 trees and 10 million liters of water.
Using eSign services helps Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, save time: The college reduced turnaround times with eSign from days or hours to an average of just 19 minutes.
Kuhn Krause, a leading provider of farm equipment, has also found value in using e-signatures. The company calculated a five-fold reduction in the cost of paper printing.
Adobe strives to promote sustainability from within. Its internal campaign to reduce business travel, called “Skip a Trip,” encouraged employees to take a voluntary pledge to skip one business trip in 2014 and use the Web conferencing tool Connect instead. Through the campaign, employees saved 331 metric tons of carbon emissions in just eight months. They also avoided 711,000 miles of air travel, which is equal to traveling around the world 29 times, and a savings of over 37,000 gallons of gasoline.
