Being Carbon neutral means that any amount of CO2 one entity releases into the atmosphere must be balanced out by some other activity that takes away CO2 from the atmosphere, the net result is carbon neutrality.
If an entity ends up taking more CO2 away than it created, that would make it “climate positive”. So how do you make your company carbon neutral?
Recognizing the problem
While companies like Apple commit to decreasing their pollution footprint by making their hardware as recyclable, and biodegradable as possible, they are still putting a date as far into the future as 2040, Amazon aims to hit that target by 2030, while Microsoft believes they can become climate positive by 2030.
This requires a massive change in infrastructure, company-wide policies on how they operate. This kind of change takes a lot of time to implement, and even longer to show results. However, there are simpler things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint.
The simplest step is reducing your organization’s dependency on paper, just take a look at the environmental impact of paper production. Just take a look at some of these facts:
- Paper production is responsible for 40$ of the world’s commercially cut timber.
- Pulpwood plantations and mills put natural habitats at risk because of their runoff and resulting deforestation.
- 30 million acres of forest are destroyed annually to produce paper.
- An A4-sized paper requires 10 liters of water per sheet (there are 500 sheets in a single ream).
- Paper, when discarded, will emit flammable methane (which, if burnt, produces CO2).
Short-term solutions are more accessible
While we can’t change company policies, or entire business processes overnight. Some form of impact is possible by adding up smaller changes. If our business hands out prints for every single process (such as clinics, accounting, legal firms, etc.), we could consider a cloud-based storage solution, it can prevent needless wastage of paper, without sacrificing the process.
How to do it?
Having a reliable and versatile cloud-based storage solution can fit most (if not all) of an organization’s communication needs without relying on paper. These can be used for mass communication, sharing sensitive information, as well as general messaging without troubling the printer.
Healthcare as an example
The traditional healthcare experience is heavily reliant on paper, from patients being assigned a waiting number, to doctors checking charts, and assigning prescriptions.
Using a centralized storage solution, document management can be vastly improved. You can store medical results and other private sensitive information in a central folder online that can only be accessed by specific users while remaining invisible to everyone else. There can be subfolders in this with their own set of permissions. For example, your test results can be uploaded to a folder visible to the lab, doctor, and yourself, but the lab does not have access to any other folders.
Any other folders are strictly between involved parties.
This ensures that a patient’s private information does not acquire unauthorized access. Such a platform also keeps a detailed audit log, that tracks which user accessed which folder and when giving you greater control over your private information.
In doing all of this, you avoid creating a literal paper trail.
Accounting and Legal as an example
Admittedly, there are applications in accounting and legal where paper is unavoidable, such as receipts, legacy documents, and incoming paperwork. However, to alleviate the situation, you can get yourself a cloud storage solution that lets you search through any digital content. A search tool that lets you explore through your archive even if it is stored in read-only formats, like PDF, scanned documents, and images. This helps recovery, access, and storage.
All this should be kept secure under 256-bit bank-level encryption that prevents unauthorized access to your system, as well as a safe place for the storage server that is backed up in triplicate, ensuring that you do not lose data to any calamity or accident.
Conclusion
Long-term solutions are the only way for the world to become sustainable. However, short-term solutions can buy us enough time. To help you accomplish this, you need a powerful and reliable cloud storage solution, Folderit.
