Sustainability
At The Neat Company, we do our part to make products that help reduce our consumption and accumulation of paper. But that’s not all. We try to live and work with a conscious effort to support sustainable practices that minimize our impact on the environment.
We believe being green is not a marketing campaign or slogan, it’s a value and a way of life. For us, it’s not just about using less paper, it’s about keeping less paper, and storing less paper and passing on less paper. After all, what’s really valuable is the information on the paper, not the paper itself.
Tips for a Paper-Less Life
A paper free life would be ideal, but simply using less paper is a goal we can easily achieve. Reducing your paper consumption is ongoing challenge, but Neat gives you the tools to make real changes in the way you manage papers at work and at home.
Keep Less. Our scanners + digital filing systems are designed to help you store and organize all of your paperwork without all the paper. You can scan and organize digital copies of all of your business and personal documents, such as contracts, invoices, receipts, financial statements, medical forms, insurance forms and everything else you need to hold onto.
Neat gives you the ability to find the information you need and produce PDF copies of any documentation. Changing over your existing filing cabinet to a digital system will save you time, energy and frustration over time.
What else can you do? Get bills and financial statements online instead of paper. You can even save PDF copies of your statements in your Neat digital filing system.
Share Less. You can make a significant impact on your paper usage by sharing documents electronically. Neat gives you the tools to transform papers into digital files, but that's only the beginning. By learning how to share and manage digital documents, you can collaborate digitally, rather than shuffling more pieces of paper.
No more faxing. Neat gives you the power to scan and email documents rather than sending someone another piece of paper. Scanned documents are easier to read, faster to deliver and less burdensome on the recipient.
Editing drafts electronically: Use the “track changes”, "edit" and "comment" features in your word processing program, instead of writing notes on paper.
Manage documents online: Try using software like Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs to collaborate with your peers instead of passing along more papers.
Be concise: A great way to reduce paper is simply to write less. Organize your thoughts and communicate clearly and succinctly. Keep your letters to one page whenever possible.
Publish online: Rather than printing a newsletter or letter, try creating an online version instead. You can create a blog or PDF rather than a traditional printed newsletter.
Print Less. Printing is one of the biggest opportunities to reduce your paper consumption. Taking the time to think about each print job before you hit “print” can make a significant difference.
Print to PDF: If you want to save something you read online, try saving it as a PDF instead of on paper. Simply "print to PDF” to generate a PDF of any document. There are several free PDF solutions available online, and NeatReceipts comes with Abbyy's PDF Transformer 2.0 at no additional charge when purchased directly from The Neat Company.
Print on both sides: Newer printers can automatically handle duplex printing, and you should be able to change your print settings to print documents on both sides of a piece of paper.
Update your letterhead: There are a number of small changes you can make to your letterhead to make it hold more words per page. Use a smaller font, make your margins slightly wider, and make your headers and footers as small as possible.
Print preview: Many pages print with a blank page at the end. Take a moment to view a “print preview” and you can avoid unnecessary and extraneous pages at the end of your document.
Avoid extra copies: Print the minimum number of copies you need and make additional copies later if you need them.
Reuse paper: Use the back of pages that have already been printed for your printer, fax machine, and for scratch paper instead of using new sheets.
Here’s how we try to “walk the walk” in our own daily lives: Workspace Of course we believe in using less paper, and we make every attempt to do our work digitally. However, we do have to use paper and cardboard in our work so we are sure to recycle and reuse what we can.
We use 30% less office space than similar companies our size. How? We don’t have offices or cubicles – we all sit in the same room in desk clusters. It can get a little noisy but has a great side benefit – our communication is 100% better and more open than if we had walls and doors.
Transportation 95% of our employees take public transportation, walk or bike to work. We collectively chose to locate the company convenient to public transportation to make this possible. Several of our employees drive hybrid vehicles and we rent cars as needed from Philly Car Share, a non-profit organization dedicated to maximizing the economic, environmental, and social benefits of reduced automobile dependence through community-based car sharing.
Packaging We recently converted our retail packaging to 100% recyclable material that is built from 70% post-consumer content. We developed form fitting packaging with just enough material to protect our product for shipping. This helps us use less natural materials to make the boxes and expend less fuel to ship them.