Many companies are working hard to reduce both the consumption of natural resources and the generation of waste, yet each day employees walk by one of the biggest resource wasters in the office: the fax machine.
According to Energy Star, fax machines are one of the most energy-intensive pieces of equipment because they constantly draw power in order to be available at any hour. Then there’s the amount of paper fax machines consume. Every page of every fax is printed out, regardless of whether it contains useful information. If the fax transmission is interrupted or the fax becomes garbled on the receiving end, even more paper is needed to correct the problem.
Still, how big of an issue is paper consumption? Businesses that require handwritten notes or authorized signatures often send and receive thousands of pages of documents each year. Often, businesses scan those faxes to create electronic documents that are easier to save and share, discarding the original paper. Or, they purchase filing cabinets or storage space to keep all their paper files until they don’t need them anymore—or until the government says they can be discarded.
There is a simple solution to all of this waste: Internet fax services.
An Internet fax service allows users to send and receive faxes through their regular email accounts or a secure online server. In addition, users can:
- recycle their current fax machine, or avoid purchasing one at all, reducing energy usage and eliminating future problems with disposing of office equipment;
- severely reduce paper consumption, as users print only the pages they want;
- eliminate the cost of garbled pages or mis-feeds that waste paper without providing the information that’s needed; and
- eliminate the need for a second phone line, saving energy and material costs.
If 1 percent of all paper faxes were sent electronically, estimates show 73.5 million trees would be saved. Other environmental issues make Internet faxing a responsible technology to adopt. Dangerous bleaching chemicals such as chlorine, sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide are used as whitening agents to make fax paper. Fax machines also require ink cartridges, which ultimately take up landfill space unless they are recycled.
Beyond environmental responsibility, Internet faxing allows users to send and receive faxes when they’re out of the office, which is far more convenient for mobile workers. And while a traditional fax machine leaves confidential information out in the open, Internet services deliver faxes directly to an online or email account, enhancing security. This also means every fax is just a couple of mouse clicks away, which is more convenient than finding older files in a storage room.
Unlike some new corporate policies that wind up costing more than conducting business as usual, an Internet fax service helps organizations save money. It can reduce startup costs 93 percent by eliminating the cost of the fax machine and installation of a second phone line. It also can reduce monthly costs by 89 percent by eliminating the cost of toner and fees for a second phone line, as well as by curbing paper consumption.