The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that in 2018, 17.2 million tons of paper products went to landfills. One unexpected upside of the COVID-19 pandemic was that digitizing workflows  reduced paper waste. That’s where Electronic Document (E-Doc) Services comes in.

“We want to greatly reduce paper use on campus,” electronic document management specialist Craig Topple says.

Topple’s vision for the department is to eliminate paper, free up office space, and make digital document routing available for campus processes by utilizing RebelDocs as a document management system. The department recently completed a project for the Lee School of Business advising center that included 240,000 documents. That means 80 boxes of paper are no longer sitting in storage at Beam Hall. 

Digitizing paper processing cuts down on landfill usage and saves other resources for the university that we don’t typically think of, Topple noted. Employees and students can locate documents easily in an online database as opposed to searching through countless boxes. Delivery Services cuts down on transporting boxes of documents which cuts down on fuel usage and transportation costs. The university’s effort to digitize files not only saves trees, it saves time and effort.