If you are wondering how to cut back on paper use in your school, there are many ways.
While it may not seem like passing out a few worksheets in a single classroom is an unusually large amount of paper to use. Once you start taking factors like the amount of classrooms in a school, the days in a school year and the number of schools in the United States into consideration, the numbers on paper use in education begin to stack up. If you are wondering how to cut back on paper use in your school, there are many ways. Read to learn how to reduce paper use in school by going paperless to save some money.
How Much Paper Are Schools Really Using?
While some may picture school paper consumption as just handing out some worksheets during class, it’s important to consider the bigger picture, as mentioned before, when you do the math, by not going paperless, the paper used for the entire country is astronomical.
Paper Use in Education
A typical school will use about 2,000 sheets of paper per day, meaning that during an entire school year of 160 days, a school will go through over 320,000 sheets of paper per year. With around 100,000 schools in the United States, this means that all together schools are consuming as much as 30 billion sheets of paper per year. This a massive amount of paper used that leaves these schools with negative carbon footprints.
The Price of Using Paper
With the average cost of a sheet of paper being around five cents, you can now calculate paper costs based on the total amount being used in United States schools per year. For a school that uses 2,000 sheets of paper per day and 320,000 in one year, they can expect to pay around $16,000 per year. For the United States as a whole, this adds up to close to $1.6 billion spent on paper annually.
Reducing Your Paper Use
Instead of traditional paper-based school records, making the switch to a digital document storage system for managing files can cut back on your paper consumption. Besides reducing paper use, digital education files can also boost productivity and save money, time, and space otherwise required to manage paper records. By going paperless, you can digitally file and store student transcripts, special education files, financial aid applications, medical records, student publications, faculty files, HR records, student registrations, and school schedules as well.
Going paperless is the future, if you have questions regarding document management or conversion, give Micro Records a call!
Have Questions? Micro Records is Here to Help
If you have more questions about document management software, Micro Records is here to help you with all of your needs. We can help your business to transition to a paperless way of life with outstanding e-forms and technology. For more information about how we can help you implement your new document management software, visit us online or give us a call at 877-410-SCAN. For more tips, tricks, and to see what we have been working on, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.