Jumping to Digital Means Jumping to a Sustainable Future

(Paper waiting to be recycled at a recycling facility. Often we forget that this process uses valuable energy.)

“Going green” – it’s a concept that we hear a lot about these days. We hear about it on commercials, in our offices, via government initiatives that exhort us to help the environment. Everyone agrees that helping the environment is important – but many disagree over what methods are best to accomplish this goal. Often in our rush to change light bulbs and split our recycling into cans and bottles and plastic, we forget that the most basic ideas are the best ones.

At FileBank, our effort to help the environment revolves around one simple goal: to use less paper. And by less paper, in many cases we mean no paper at all. Think about the future in which offices around the nation will be entirely digital – it is not a matter of “if,” but rather “when.” FileBank exists to help businesses transition into that future as quickly as possible. We have many solutions that businesses can take advantage of – and the benefits are literally endless when one considers the positive, permanent environmental impact these solutions have.

Going paperless means so much more than just saving trees. It also means lessening the carbon footprint that will be produced by cutting down and processing those trees for paper. It means less energy wasted on recycling the paper for reuse, and less energy to ship it from place to place and store it. The space needed to accommodate our physical archive space versus our digital servers is a telling comparison: while we need a facility the size of a football field to store documents, we can use a room you could barely park a car in to manage our digital records. As more and more businesses and government entities embrace the paperless lifestyle, the need for giant storage facilities will slowly disappear. As energy resources transition to renewable methods rather than carbon belching fossil fuels, the whole planet will benefit from these efforts to modernize how America does business.

So if you’re considering going paperless, make sure to think not only of the benefits you’ll have tomorrow, but the benefits that generations will have in the future. When you’re thinking about the costs, make sure to also think of the environmental costs of not acting soon.

Since going green is such an important theme of FileBank’s work, I will continue to update you on news, projects and other initiatives related to this topic.

Stay tuned!

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist