The Paperless Office

Retailers in the UK spend a fortune on plastic bags. Plastic bags are everywhere. Just look in the hedgerows across our green and pleasant land. There is a massive procurement machine operating across our retailers who do nothing more than focus on buying plastic bags. You'd think they'd understand that competitive advantage could be acquired by buying less plastic bags. No instead the focus is on buying more plastic bags for less. They call it 'economies of scale'. Buying plastic bags does not encourage green working practises. Green working practises tend to be leaner. So we have enviromentally unfriendly procurement teams working for all the major retailers who think the answer is the paperless office in the back office. That is the extent of their innovation and contribution to the the green agenda. Right up to the late 90's most retailer's procure to pay processes for buying plastic bags were paper based. Paper orders, paper goods received notes, paper invoices, cardboard boxes to store all the paper and vans to take the card board boxes to archiving storage facilities. You know the buildings that take up enormous amounts of space while young families are crammed into our cities. The paperless office in a retail environment is the ulimate pointless gesture to indicate a committment towards sustainable development. Here is their real committment. Planes that transport food from 3rd world countries to our countrie creating a massive carbon foot print. The excessive amounts of packaging generating the need for incinerators near where people live. The tonnes of paper catalogues where on every page they encourage people to take out credit. Not to mention the zillion gallons of ink that has to be produced. Chemicals that generate tonnes of pollutants. Most large organisations operating across the FMCG sector have monolithic Head Office. Every so often their paperless offices have a 'chuck out your chimps day'. A metaphor for getting rid of the accumalated 'tatt'. Namely, reams of meaningless reports, stacks of industrial publications and glossy brochures from smaller companies trying to do business with larger companies. And so the cycle continues. The paperless office is a symbolic gesture to convince office based staff they are doing something valuable with their time. Paper on desks is the ultimate mis-representation of productivity in the modern day work-place. Why get rid of something that the guy responsible for your bonus uses as a visual cue to gauge your contribution? 20% of the world's population employed in the paperless office consume 80% of the world's resources. Behind this statistic is a multi billion pound marketing indsutry who want us to consume more for the sake of shareholder value. 80%of the world's population want what weve got. In the paperless office you are not there to talk about things that really matter. You are not encouraged to work in ways to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Our next door neigbours in the global village. The kids from areas of the world where Al Qaeda have no problem with recruitment. Check out life in the paperless office. The modern day workplace. Most of us live there and most of the USA's and UK's security budget is spent on protecting the infrastructure that houses it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzBy6agXKoA