This year Earth Day is on April 22nd. It is a day to evaluate your impact on the environment. There are little changes that can add up around the office. The real advantage is saving money and reducing overhead.

1) Recycle your paper. Make sure you recycle all of your office paper. This can reduce you trash costs since the largest volume disposed of is office paper. The easiest way to recycle all the office paper is to have your shredding service handle it. Don't use a service? Now ere is a big opportunity to save. Their equipment is much faster than what any office has and cost less than paying employees to do the same work. The paper is recycled, the information is destroyed, and costs are reduced. The ever elusive win-win-win.

2) Go paperless. It your office is still passing around paper it is time to upgrade. With records scanning and a good electronic document management system (EDM) the amount of paper can be dramatically reduced. And the cost of the paper is the smallest of the savings. The real value is in streamlining the daily flow of work and make company records easy to search and retrieve.

3) Reduce electricity consumption. An easy source of savings is with the electrical bill. Most office equipment is left on when no one is at work. This makes sense for brief periods of time but printers left on all weekend are nothing but a drain on the operating budget. Enable the power save feature on the equipment are better yet use power strips to completely stop the electrical drain.