Narrator
 Feel buried under paper? You're not alone. The average office worker use 10,000 sheets of paper each year. In most offices paper is the biggest item in the waste stream. Whether it goes into the recycling bin or into the trash, it costs money to buy, time to handle, space to store and resources to create.
The key is to prevent waste in the first place. If you prevent waste by practicing some of the techniques we'll talk about today, you can easily cut your paper costs by one-third. If you buy only two cases of paper instead of three each month you'll save $360 annually and as much as ten times more in handling, printing, copying, filing and mailing costs.
Today we'll visit several Oregon businesses to learn what they're doing to prevent waste. We'll talk about paper, but also show you ways to cut non-paper waste. Maybe some of their ideas will inspire you.
The Corvallis Chamber of Commerce has changed the way it uses paper…
Patricia Mulder-Corvallis Chamber of Commerce
One of the things chambers of commerce are noted for is an incredible number of meetings… involving lots and lots of people… an incredible generation of paper. We're trying to cut down on the paper part of it at least. We've done that several ways. We used to notify people of all meetings. Sending them reminder notices on a full sheet of 8 1/2 X 11 paper in an envelope. So we cut out the envelope…turned them into tri-folds and stuck a mailing label on them. But you're still paying postage and still consuming a lot of staff time. We then moved to fax machines. Again, fax machines are slow, they take up staff time and they've got a piece of paper at the other end. Our latest move is to try and notify, wherever we can, people by email. It's much, much faster. Saves us tremendous dollars. We don't pay postage. We don't pay paper. And no one at the other end is receiving a piece of paper. We've found it's been tremendously effective.
 This is a pretty standard copy machine. I'm sure you could find one very similar to it in almost every office in the country. They all come these days with duplexers. Once you learn how to operate a duplexer which takes about 14 seconds you got that knowledge for life. And it's easy to do. The machines do it for you. I can't image why anyone would not do it. Our people who sit on committees appreciate it. They don't want to go home with 65 pages of paper. We don't want to pay the paper bills. The recycling folks appreciate it because they get tired of hauling away our recycling. It's a win win situation for everyone. And I can't image why you wouldn't do it.
Each month we mail out about 800 newsletters to members. This keeps them updated on what we're doing. In the past these went in a large white envelope. Now they are self mailers as you can see there's just a little box down on the bottom page…back page…and the mailing label goes on and it all goes out bulk rate. Sometimes if we have inserts we just stick a staple in and the whole thing goes. This saved us about $340 a year in envelopes and about $50 in excess postage weights. Doesn't sound like a lot but for a non profit it's a lot of money.
Narrator
The Detlefsen Law office cuts paper waste by reducing copies of its invoice forms from three to two; by using the blank side of used paper to print drafts of documents and reusing manila envelopes. The firm also changed the way it printed invoices.
Jeff Detlefsen-Detlefsen Law Office
To some extent in a leap of faith I decided that even though some of my invoices are for large amounts they did not have to be real thick and fat to demonstrate how much work I had done. But I could in fact reduce the paper in half by just going single space. And it was more compact. And I haven't had one client suggest that my services weren 't as valuable because the amount of paper in their invoice was smaller than before.
Narrator
Electronic media can cut down on paper and improve communications with members and employees. Oregon's own Mentor Graphics has shifted many of its paper forms and directories to their intranet.
 Kristen Beach-Mentor Graphics
We used to print out a lot of things on paper that are now on the intranet. For instant these manuals. They were given out to each employee. This company phone directory is printed out once a month for 75 employees. At 150 sheets of paper per manual that's 135,000 sheets of paper per year. That's equivalent to 270 reams of paper. Now all of this is available on line for each employee. It saves time, you don't have to flip through the manuals anymore. They also don't have to be assembled. With a click of the mouse you can find any person's name in our company's directory.
Our buying guide, our purchasing manual, is also given to each employee. But now it is online as well. Many of our vendors are online so you can order directly from them instead of filling out this three page requisition. It's much easier and it's much more time efficient as well as saving paper. Our new employee manual is now also available online. It's easier to use and more efficient and it's updated regularly so it doesn't have to be printed out for each employee every year.
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