[Infographic] How to Run a Paperless Office for Earth Day 2014

Happy Earth Day! Here at SIGNiX, we're doing our part by using digital documents instead of paper, saving billions of pages of paper each year. It's inspiring to me to be doing something with such a global impact on the environment. 

Did you know:

• The average office worker uses 10,00 sheets of copy paper each year
• American offices use 4 million tons of paper each year
• The average document is copied 9 to 11 times
• A typical employee spends 30%-40% of their time looking for information lost in e-mail, documents, shared hard disks and filing cabinets
• Paper in the average business grows by 22% a year, meaning your paper will double in 3.3 years
• U.S. managers spend an average of 4 weeks a year searching for or waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked or lost papers

As we celebrate Earth Day, I hope you'll join this global effort to protect the environment by going paperless. And remember, it's not an "all or nothing" thing! Every step you take toward going paperless is one step closer to a cleaner world.

Here are some easy ways to reduce your paper waste:

• Online Faxing: Many businesses still rely on fax machines to send and receive important information. If you aren't ready to throw out the fax altogether, you can set up an account with an online fax service. With this service, you'll receive or send PDF files through an online "fax," which will eliminate the need for paper. Faxes are sent and received via email or a web interface, depending on the service.
• Electronic Contracts: Most businesses need contracts signed at some point, which can result in a lot of paper waste. Luckily, e-signatures have been legally binding for more than 10 years, and e-signature services are fast and easy to use. Simply upload your contracts into an e-signature service and send it out electronically. This eliminates the need to send contracts by mail. 
• Paperless Billing: Invoices make up a large amount of the paper in an office, and there are alternate solutions to the traditional billing methods. Paperless billing can be done by email or by using an online service.  
• Scan and Recycle Documents: You probably already have a backlog of paperwork to deal with as you transition to a paperless office. To deal with this, scan and save documents as PDF files. A scanner with optical character recognition software is a great choice because it will make your documents searchable. Shred and recycle any unnecessary documents.