Emails, memorandums, letters, reports, transaction, and financial documents are just a small part of what consists of office documents and business information. These documents are handled so many times in a day, they often get lost in passing from person to person. On average, all of these documents are scanned and copied 19 times! All those “worthless” papers in your mailbox, the memos floating around the office, and those invoices you need to file your reports are integral in the structure of your employer and its business model. Losing the entirety of these documents, such as in a flood, would kill your company within three weeks. While this seems unlikely, 1 in 4 businesses will experience this catastrophe.
When you take these documents for granted, or simply can not locate the document necessary to complete your assignment because the filer took the document for granted, you can consequently cost your company $14,000 in productivity alone. For the time it takes to locate a document, the document ends up costing the company six times what the document was originally worth. Not caring for documents is extremely cost ineffective and contributes to the paper industry being the 4th largest greenhouse gas contributor in the US. The average American contributes up to 200 lbs of paper disposal. If we can restrict our paper consumption by only 10%, we can we can cut GHG emissions equivalent to 280,00o cars on the road! By caring more about a single piece of paper, we can help our companies, and more importantly our environment. [via]