Volume 3, No. 4. February 28, 2003
Trash
talk
Whenever Jane Hartline,
the marketing manager of the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon, visits zoo or county
government offices, she strikes fear in the hearts of the office occupants.
“They go, ‘Ohmygosh! Jane’s here, we’ve got to get paper
off the table,'” Hartline said.
Hartline is a member of the Green Team, comprising staff members charged with
developing environmentally friendly initiatives at the zoo. One of their most
ambitious campaigns is to create an entirely paperless operation, an initiative
that Hartline has expanded to the zoo’s governing authority, the tri-county
Metro Regional Government.
“We think the animals need the trees more than we do. That’s basically
where it comes from” Hartline said. “We think because we think that
and we’re in a position to influence a lot of people, we have to set an
example.”
Boy, what an example. The Oregon Zoo is not merely looking at improving recycling
programs and reusing scrap paper; it is looking at ridding itself of as much
as 90 percent of all paper used in its bureaucracy. “We’ve done a
matrix of what it would take to be paperless,” Hartline said. For instance,
“We spend a lot of paper, all of us do, on forms. So, how do you turn those
into paperless processes?” Many forms now move from department to department
electronically, RFPs and contracts are being converted to e-mail forms using
electronic signatures (and then being stored digitally), and even the entire
payroll system, from time sheets to pay stubs, is converting to digital.
Meetings are now paperless, as the zoo installed wireless connections in the
conference rooms so people can use projectors and their laptop computers to
share documents. Newsletters and staff notices are posted on an internal web
site, as is the employee manual, safety procedures, internal phone directory
and other personnel matter. File cabinet contents are being transferred to CD-ROM's.
Printed resources, such as the Yellow Pages, are being replaced by on-line sources.
Suppliers must agree to contracts calling for reduced packing material, and
staff members are prompted to make their work stations paperless.
“We want to pick off the low-hanging fruit first,” she said, noting
that the first step was training staff to think of alternatives to paper and
getting them to change habits. “For god’s sake, people, stop printing
your e-mail. If it’s generated on a computer, it should stay on a computer.
Sometimes you take notes and want to think on paper, so we got some plastic
clipboards and you take your stock of scrap paper and put it face down on that
clipboard. There’s no reason to use legal pads anymore.”
Going paperless would, in the long run, save money, too, Hartline said, pointing
to the Metro generating about 30,000 pieces of paper a month and spending about
$82,000 a year to do so. The initiative also should improve efficiency, she
said, as long as the data is properly organized. “You can’t have a
million icons all over your desktop,” she said, but she likewise noted
that the traditional file cabinet has always been at the mercy of the filer’s
peculiar sense of organization. Similarly, arguments that electronic files are
more prone to being lost than paper files falter in the face of floods and fire;
besides, electronic files are easier to back up and store off-site (a web site
is, effectively, off site) than are paper files.
Hartline said all organizations have a few “Luddites” who resist such
transitions, but for the most part the staff at Oregon Zoo and the local governing
agency are embracing the paperless ideal. “It’s kind of like in the
old days, you could put a piece of paper in the trash can and you didn’t
feel guilty,” she said. “Today you feel like a schmuck if you don’t
recycle. So how do you get to feel that way about printing your e-mails? We
used to pride ourselves on how many tons of stuff we recycled. That’s not
a good statistic anymore.”
THE LOOP is written and produced by Eric Minton, Minton Enterprises, LLC. To see more examples of Eric Minton's work and Minton Enterprises services, visit www.ericminton.com.
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