Instead of handing your customers and clients oodles of reports, a key green office strategy is to digitize the paper, especially reports, legal documents and catalogs.

Producing reports in a CD format saves trees and shipping costs. A 100-pound package of paper shipped from LA to New York can run you $50. The CD equivalent is only $1.05 via first-class mail, according to E.C. Goggio, president of the digitization company, Mirror Image Media.

Goggio’s Milwaukee-based company promotes his CD services as a clean, green alternative to turning trees into paper. For example:

• Lessiter Publishing Co. saved over 1,000 trees when it produced 1,000 conference guides, materials and catalogs on CD instead of the old paper versions. The company says this eliminates 10 million pieces of paper and the greenhouse gases and other pollutants associated with paper production.
• Ziegler Wealth Management transferred legal documents for 2,000 recipients to CD instead of paper. This eliminated 72,000 pieces of paper, and
• Walter AG put its industrial catalogs on CD and eliminated 25,000 catalogs, which totaled about 7.5 million pages of paper not created.

The everyday CD can hold up to 20,000 letter-sized pages of black and white documents. Using the CD instead of paper eliminates processing of 24 trees.

Plus, storing company documents on CD is a time saver because computers quickly search for the document you need to retrieve. Goggio says that the typical worker spends an average of 150 hours a year looking for lost paper documents. That search can be done instantly with a CD-based retrieval system.