3 Ways Your Computer Can Help Turn Your Home Office Green

These days everyone is looking for more ways to clean up the environment.  If you have a home office, here are some ideas to help you use your desktop and laptop computers to make your lifestyle greener.

Consider using digital storage instead of printing everything out. You can scan important legal documents and store them on your hard drive instead of keeping multiple hard copies in storage.  Even if you work in an industry that requires by law that you keep records for a number of years, you can usually find ways to at least reduce the amount of printouts you do on a regular basis.  And at this point, many state and federal laws have been amended to allow digital storage of files that need to be maintained for several years.

There are now many online vendors to choose from who can provide digitally secure storage for your computer’s files.  The cost of online storage is usually a lot less than renting an off-site storage unit to fill with boxes and boxes of paper.  If you can use digital storage, you can save money, and you can also save a lot of trees.

If you use a fax system regularly, you can save money by switching to an online fax service. You won’t have to waste paper and printer ink on spam faxes or faxes that are incomplete…just delete them from your hard drive.  You also won’t miss out on important faxes because of an empty ink cartridge.  Not only will you save on paper and printer ink, but you‘ll have an automatic digital copy on your hard drive of every fax you send or receive.  And you’ll never have to buy a new fax machine again.  Just do an internet search for online fax services and choose the one with a plan that fits your needs.

Another way to reduce using paper is to switch to online banking and billing.  Most  banks and utility companies today have options for paperless billing.  You can receive and pay all of your bills online.  In fact, most other services that bill you on a regular basis now have the option for online billing.  Cable companies, credit card companies and phone companies all have the resources to eliminate paper bills and make all of your transactions online.  By handling all of your bills online, you can save reams of paper and have copies of your transactions automatically stored on your hard drive.

It’s easy to see that the more you use your computer, the greener your office will be.  Start with these small steps.  Then if you want to get really serious about having a green home office, you can always add solar panels to power your computers.