Employee Tips
City employees share their tips for reducing paper use.
Department of Executive Administration
I am the report lead for the Summit project. The Summit reports
were created as an online application so that users do not have to
print out copies of the reports. Unfortunately old habits die hard
and users still like to have hard copies in files. Summit does not
encourage or promote the printing of reports. Electronic versions are
always available online for at least a year and a half and then
electronic copies are available by request and the Reports team
emails the reports. We have a specific set of reports that is
distributed to City directors via hard-copy but that is a single set
of reports for WMBE information.
Jamie Carnell, Business
Technology Division, Department of Executive Admin
Department of Planning and Development
DPD stopped printing the monthly calendar. It was already being
emailed to everyone, so they stopped printing it and so far no-one
misses it.
Laurel Mercury, Planning and Development, Parks
Department
Human Services
HSD researched the rationale behind an old policy to print
contracts single sided and discovered no reason to continue with the
outdated policy. Now all contracts are printed on both sides, saving
close to 50% of the paper, and HSD is in the process of notifying
other departments of the change.
Barbara Lewy, Payroll, Human Resources Division
Parks
Parks Contracts division has been printing contracts double sided
for years. They are now writing a contract standard that they will
forward to Dewy Potter to notify all Parks divisions that contracts
should be printed double sided.
Mary Alderete, Contracts, Parks Department
Stopped printing Direct Vouchers since they are available
on-line.
Cynthia Boyce, Conservation Crews, Parks
Department
Instead of making reams of paper openly available for staff,
started keeping paper in a closet and stocking the copiers and
printers when necessary. Paper use dropped by 50%!
August Drake-Erickson, Superintendent's Office,
Parks Department
Offer (at no charge) to check mailing lists against the Post
Office's web based master address files before any mailing
goes out. Almost without exception, enough bad addresses are
eliminated to more than pay for the cost of the service. In general
the savings are much more than the cost of the service, and the
biggest reduction was when a list was more than 60% bad addresses.
Not only does this save paper, it also saves approximately
$1/piece.
Martin Kral, Print Shop, Parks Department
Larry asked the Parks trainer to change the Groupwise and File
Management curriculums to incorporate paper saving strategies.
Larry Zolton, Senior Training Coordinator, Parks
Department
Melanie Chin emailed all Parks CLASS system users a new technique
to reduce paper consumption. She shared the steps to generate an
on-line "Weekly Sign In/Out sheet" for child care programs.
Previously the standard practice was to print a daily sheet for each
child care program. This will save about 7800 sheets per year, and
also might be used additional programs, saving even more paper.
Melanie Chin, CLASS System, Parks Department
Parks Payroll stopped printing time sheets, saving about 35,000
sheets per year. They are using single sided documents as
“Second Chance” paper for printing drafts, control
sheets and emails.
Corrie Ernsdorff, Payroll, Parks Department
Discovered that the printers at Densmore have duplexers and
started using them!
Linda Guzzo and David Jensen, Senior and Special Pops,
Parks Department
Started printing the Draft Design program documents double
sided.
Erin Devoto, PDD, Parks Department
I learned that the monthly Summit reports I’d been printing
are always available on-line, so I stopped printing them.
Kathy Anderson, Conservation Crews, Parks Dept.
We discovered that the HRIS reports could be printed double
sided.
Corrie Ernsdorff, Payroll, Parks Dept.
Personnel
We are estimating that we save roughly 780 to 910 sheets a year.
This is just one report. We are also duplexing other reports and
saving even more paper.
Gail Reichelt, Accounting Services/Worker's Comp, Personnel
Department
Seattle City Light
TIP: Be sure to cancel ALL names associated with that fax number,
as companies often have three or four employees receiving the same
fax.
Nicole Warbis, Network Engineering, Seattle City
Light
Seattle Public Utilities
When someone starts giving me a paper copy of a document, I ask
them if they can email an electronic version to me instead. This way,
I eliminate paper from my desk, and end up using less paper because
everything is electronic to begin with.
Ron Harris-White, Clean Green Seattle, Seattle Public
Utilities
Everyday dozens of unwanted faxes relating to vacations, training,
and mortgages come through our city faxes administrative staff can
make a significant contribution by collecting these junk faxes and
dialing the 1-800 numbers posted near the bottom of most ads to
remove our number from their fax list. Most can be cancelled by
dialing one toll free number and listening to prompts that verify
cancellation.
1) I have stopped printing and maintaining a hard copy file of
bi-weekly time sheets for Water Distribution (that's about 100
legal-size pieces of paper every two weeks) and
2) I have stopped printing and distributing agendas for Water
Operations' staff meetings (that's at least another 60 pieces of
paper each month.
Kathryn Altman, Water Operations, Seattle Public
Utilities
My co-worker (Mai Wong) and I pay Worker Compensation claims and
we have gone from printing a daily report to duplexing it and now we
have eliminated printing it altogether. We determined that we never
look at it, so why print it. Therefore we use this slogan: "think
before you ink", something I thought of. In light of all the
"cuts" the city has been doing I wanted a more positive angel than
PaperCuts.
SPU's Technology Systems Lateral Team (TSLT) meets twice a month,
and up to 20 staff attend each meeting. The meetings focus on complex
business cases for technology projects. Before the PaperCuts
campaign, we printed handouts for each meeting and provided binders
to each member for storing the materials. Now we don't print any
handouts. We e-mail the materials out ahead of time, use a laptop and
projector during the meeting and store the materials on a website
accessible to everyone. We are saving approximately 5,000 sheets of
paper per year, not to mention the labor of printing and collating,
and no one seems to miss the old hard copies.
Charles Spear, Information Technology, Seattle Public
Utilities
July, 2006 - Creating Second Change Paper
Second Chance paper is simply one-sided paper that can be used again. Rather than recycle your misprints, or old reports, why not create a "second chance" pile and use this paper when printing? The Seattle Public Library staff has created a sign on green paper and laminated it. They placed it next to a simple desk organizer tray to remind staff and the public to place their discarded or unwanted copies in a central place for reuse. Second chance paper is being collected in offices and public areas throughout Seattle libraries. SPL is taking PaperCuts to the neighborhoods! Why not try it in your office?
Thanks to Joan Schlichting, from the Seattle Public Libraries Communications Office for creating this fabulous poster!
June, 2006 - Junk Faxes
Stop the circulation of annoying JUNK FAXES. Here’s a tip that really works! Try “AG Labels,” a sheet of labels that you can print and use. Whenever you receive a junk fax, tape an AG label to it and forward the junk fax (by fax, of course!) to the State Attorney General (206- 464-6451). Please note that you should replace the SPU fax number with your own. Do this in the upper left hand box and all the others will automatically correct.
Thanks to Mark Fowble, SPU Customer Service, for this fabulous paper-saver!
May, 2006 - Get Rid of Excess White Space
You can adjust what you print in several programs. If you're printing an item with plenty of “white space” (double-spaced text or small tables or diagrams, for instance), you can put two or even four pages per side of a sheet of paper. Choose “Print,” then click “pages per sheet” in the lower right-hand corner.
April, 2006 - Don't Print - Post
Are you a Paperholic? Do you need snow boots to get to your cubicle? Is your desk cluttered with reports that you don’t even use? Take a tip from PaperCuts – Request that reports be posted the shared drive or sent out electronically. By doing this, you paper waste and still have the ability to print the selected pages you want.
January, 2006 - Electronic File Clean Up
File Clean–up Time is Here Again This is a great time to help the environment by starting 2006 with less paper. PaperCuts is a new program to make our lives easier by cutting out paper that we don't really need. As you mull through and recycle unneeded papers, think about doing the same with your electronic storage files. You may want to delete drafts that you saved but no longer need or files that have been saved to other places that you can easily access. If you hate to delete stuff you can save files on cds for later retrieval. It really works, just remember to label your cd so you can recall the data.
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