The back page this week is all about the production of the back page, a cutting-edge paperless process pioneered by Alex Smith. Now, if only we didn’t have to print 25,000 copies for you lot ...

The back page has been brought to you this week using a revolutionary, epoch-making new process (well, it is to us anyway).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, myself and the pioneering sub-editing team have taken our professional lives into our hands and produced this page without using a single piece of paper.

That means no reporter’s notebooks, no printed proofs, and no sticky notes have been sacrificed in the making of this page. Instead we exchanged proofs online using Adobe Acrobat.

Too much paper is generated in Building’s office. I can barely see our architecture editor for the mountain of notes piled on his desk, and our fax machine seems to be marooned in a sea of printouts.

Joining our company’s environmental working group has opened my eyes to the waste in my micro-environment. Not just paper, but also energy – the other night I did a covert audit of our monitors and PCs and found a third had been left on overnight. And, yes, being the environmental snoop does nothing for your popularity in the office.

As the organisation behind the 99% low energy campaign, Building has a responsibility to cut its own CO2. Here are a few ideas the working group has come up with that may or may not help:

  • Name and shame the carbon obese
  • Buy some woodland – think how much your coppicing will be worth when biofuel replaces oil and gas
  • Publish league tables showing how many PCs and monitors have been left on
  • Use green taxis
  • Buy printers that only print out when you press a button on the fascia (having to walk to the machine will deter the lazy from needless printouts)
  • Get rid of the fax – who uses them?

Postscript

Alex Smith is Building’s web editor