The facilities staff at Toronto Rehab’s Lyndhurst Centre and Rumsey Centre are constantly on the look out for new green ideas, with current ongoing investigations into LED lighting, efficient equipment operation, and mechanical controls. Led by facilities manager Mark Lagerquist, their most recent accomplishment has been converting their work order system to a paperless tablet system.
The site has two tablets which facilities staff use to assign, log, and track work orders instead of the old method of printing off the orders and tracking them manually. Based on past paper use, the new system is saving approximately 300 sheets of paper per month – that’s about 150 pounds of paper saved each year!
The reasons for reducing paper consumption are quite clear:
- paper costs money
- manufacturing one sheet of paper can consume up to 1.5 cups of water!
- paper in it’s natural form, trees, absorbs and stores the greenhouse gas CO2
Now I know all the other departments are reading this and thinking – wow, what can I do to help follow the lead of the paper preservers in the facilities department? I’m glad you asked – here are a few simple ways to cut down on paper use in the office:
- Think before you print – do you only need certain pages of a document? Just print those pages rather than the whole document. Do you really need to print out that email with the room number of your next meeting on it? Can you do document mark-ups on word processing software rather than by hand?
- Change your default printer settings to print double sided.
- Go electronic – see above example at Lyndhurst and Rumsey. UHN’s Energy and Environment department is also using tablets for note-taking at meetings.
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