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July 6, 2012 By Sarah Rich
For several years local and state governments have been taking strides to go green. These measures have included paperless offices, energy efficient architecture and conservation campaigns aimed at the public. Several agencies, for example, have moved into Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified facilities that adhere to strict environmental design standards outlined by the U.S. Green Building Council.
A similar idea is being applied to the problem of wasteful paper-based workflows. Granicus, a cloud technologies company that focuses on government transparency, announced last month the launch of its nationwide Government Go Green Project — promoting environmental sustainability in government by reducing paper consumption through the use of iPads and other technologies that eliminate paper waste.
The company says that more than 70 government entities —most of them local governments — have signed on to the nonbinding pledge. It’s readily apparent that it’s in the company’s business interest for governments to move to paperless solutions. But only some of the Go Green pledgers are customers of the company, according to Granicus.
Several county or city clerks have left a comment on the program’s Facebook page, indicating support for their government. All the agencies that pledged already have a project in place to go green or they were in the process of implementing one, according to the company. The full list of pledging governments is posted here.
According to Tom Spengler, CEO and co-founder of Granicus, a survey the company conducted revealed that nearly 1.5 billion sheets of paper are used in local government legislative processes each year.
“It’s just amazing how much paper [government agencies] use, and so we decided that we would not only try to continue pushing for green products, but help them move to a paperless process — especially around their public meetings,” Spengler said.
Multnomah County, Ore., joined the Go Green project and has already started to reduce its paper usage by uploading board meeting packets on iPads instead of printing them on paper. Lynda Grow, the county board clerk, said the board packets “were gobbling up reams and reams and reams of paper.”
The county stopped printing board meeting packets in April 2011. The county uses the Granicus software to upload that material to the iPads. Grow said the county overall is now saving $40,000 a year on paper.
Eliminating all paper-based processes may not be an easy feat for some government agencies. Spengler said governments do know there’s much room for improvement. But challenges may arise, he conceded.
“Sometimes it hard because you have an elected official — or two, or three or five — who just doesn’t want to give up their paper,” Spengler said. “And as a staff member, it’s hard to tell your elected official, ‘No, we’re going green, and you’re not going to get paper anymore.’”
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/technology/70-Government-Entities-Commit-to-Paperless-Legislative-Workflows.html
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Two things.... First; digital is *not* more green that paper. There are benefits to each format and neither is better than the other at all things. Paper is both a renewable resources and a highly recycled/recyclable resource. It is also carbon neutral. Computers/electronics, on the other hand, use highly toxic chemicals in their manufacture and are not easily recycled at their end of life. Plus all the electricity it takes to run the computer..... it keeps going and going. The short answer is choose the most effective method for the information at hand. Second, Government can never truly be "Paperless." There are too many requirements for records retention and sunshine laws that will always require one of everything be printed and stored somewhere. And that vast storage system of computer data is going to be very hard to read after the next major storm takes out the power for more than a day or two.
I fully agree with Charles. I think the term "paperless" should be discarded completely. I think a more accurate term is "electronic paper." The information is available in electronic format (pdf, most likely) and if necessary, can be printed. Conservation begins with a shift in perspective/attitude, which will then produce the tangible result of less paper being printed.
In Benton County, OR, an hour south of Multnomah County cited in the article, we switched our board to laptops and away from desktops for their daily work and for meetings almost five years ago now. We used the MS Office suite that we already paid for to accomplish the very same things that Granicus offers by putting together the meeting packets in OneNote, which, again, we already paid for through our software licensing. It reduced our paper consumption by about 40,00 sheets per year just in the Board's offices and saved significant amounts of staff time which allows us to focus more on customer service than on meeting preparation. Sustainability is not ONLY about environmental impacts but also economic and social. Spending a significant sum of money on a new system to do what you can already achieve if you understand your existing tools is unwise.
It’s great to see a strong number of government entities committing to going paperless, especially when the government has been highly criticized for its paper waste in the past. By committing to improving the environment and increasing sustainability, governments can not only increase constituency support, but really be a driving force to influence individual daily actions. And going paperless isn’t the only sustainable commitment we’ve seen from governments recently – as a large scale, on-site furniture asset management company, we’ve seen a large increase in the number of government entities looking to refinish, remanufacture, and reupholster existing furniture assets, which can save up to 80% on budgets and 90% on carbon emissions when compared to buying new. We hope to see more government entities continue to commit to sustainable initiatives in the future.