Digital Mailroom for Sustainability

Save the planet and grow your business

You want your company to grow. You also want it to be friendly to the Earth. But when your business gets bigger, it devours more resources and generates more waste and other pollutants. How can you get powerful and prosperous without getting destructive?

You turn to technology.

High-tech tools and systems can help you stay green and clean. One of the best technologies for this purpose is Digital Mailroom, which can help you reduce:

• Air pollution
• Your carbon footprint
• Your role in global warming
• Your use of limited resources

What is Digital Mailroom?

Digital Mailroom (DMR) is a service that receives your mail, scans and digitizes it, and uploads the digitized scans to a secure web portal. On the portal, you can view your mail, redact it, write notes on it, share it with colleagues, and file and store it. And you can do it all at any time from any internet-connected device.

When you sign up with Digital Mailroom, you can choose the place or places where DMR will receive your mail. The industry term for these places is virtual addresses. You can list them as your headquarters and branch offices on your website, business cards, advertisements, and government forms.

How DMR Helps You Save Natural Resources

When you receive mail in your office, you may have to make copies for colleagues and stakeholders. Unfortunately, every copy you make contributes to the death of trees. Cutting down trees to make paper accounts for at least 13% of deforestation – some authorities put the number as high as 40% – and helps to cause global warming, species extinction, and water shortages. (Producing a single sheet of paper requires 2.6 gallons of water.)

The ink cartridges in your copier destroy more resources. Ink cartridges are mostly steel inside a plastic shell. And you know where plastic comes from: petroleum, a non-renewable resource that’s slowly running out. A single cartridge might not use much petroleum, but consider how many cartridges your office uses in a year or more.

You consume even more resources every time you set up a new office. A large office building uses 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 24 cubic feet of natural gas per square foot every year. A typical office requires about 150 square feet per person. So even a small office uses up a lot of resources.

With Digital Mailroom, you can save those resources. You don’t need to set up physical offices, because you can use virtual addresses instead. And you don’t have to use paper and ink, because Digital Mailroom sends your mail to you online, and you can distribute it the same way.

How DMR Helps You Reduce Pollution

Doing business the old-fashioned way creates waste, and much of it ends up in garbage dumps or the world’s waters.

An especially guilty culprit is copier ink and its cartridges. Spent cartridges, which are hard if not impossible to recycle, usually go into landfills. As old landfills reach their capacity, landfill owners convert more and more land to new landfills. Meanwhile, any ink left inside the cartridges, which can include volatile chemicals, can leak out. Poisons in the ink seep into the ground and kill plants near the landfills. If the poisons get into the water supply, they can endanger living things in the surrounding area.

Your copy machine is another problem. If a copier is working for half an hour a day and spends the rest of the day in standby mode, it will put about 51 kilograms (102 pounds) of carbon into the air over a year.

Other office equipment presents additional trouble. Air conditioning, for instance, produces greenhouse gases such as hydrofluorocarbons.

Building an office – or just having one – can cause pollution, too. “Buildings and construction together account for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,” says the United Nations.

And consider the commute. Road vehicles account for nearly three quarters of greenhouse gas from transportation. If your employees and colleagues drive to the office every day to get their mail, read paper documents, and handle other responsibilities, they’re part of the problem.

But your people won’t need to drive and pollute so much if they receive mail and other documents at home via a Digital Mailroom web portal. You won’t fill the sky with dangerous chemicals if you have virtual addresses instead of physical offices. And if you distribute mail online rather than by copy machine, you’ll put fewer toxins into landfills and less carbon into the air.

And More

After technologies like Digital Mailroom help you preserve natural resources and cut down on pollution, you can use these benefits in your marketing. Buyers, investors, and employees prefer to work with eco-conscious companies.

You can also save money: Why pay for paper, ink, printers, file cabinets, and office space when digital mail and virtual addresses make them unnecessary?

And possibly the best benefit of all: You can have the pleasure of knowing that you’re helping to save the world.