The office bookcase sagged under the weight of years of accumulated binders filled with catalogs, promos, product information, new plant announcements, those samples of fake grass that arrived one day long ago…
Binders are part of an old paradigm, where companies kept everyone up to date by periodically visiting, throwing out the old data and replacing it with fresh, shiny updates. Not at all sustainable.
So we’re slogging through mountains of product data.
Find the company information on the sheet, catalog, whatever. Check for a web site. Enter the URL. Does it work? If yes, bookmark in the browser and toss the contents of the binder. Not valid? Search for the company name. Nowhere? Bankrupt. Toss the contents. Repeat.
Slowly, space is growing on our shelves. We’ll use the empty binders for project files, keeping them out of the landfill, the rest goes into the recycling bin.
Some of the information was over five years old. Much was duplicated. None was easily searchable. Many of the documents dated back to 2008 before the Great Recession, their companies gone.
In the new system, everything is together. It’s as up to date as the supplier’s web site. It’s searchable. The information automatically synchronizes across all our computers, and it doesn’t lead to kilograms of wasted paper.
Unfortunately, manufacturers still haven’t quite switched paradigms. They did’t get that memo about waste reduction. They still promote paper based information, even as they tout how they’re green.