Items of Interest July 9, 2012 Issue

The Mother Church meets environmental goal

Jeff Ward-Bailey

The Mother Church (TMC), The Christian Science Publishing Society, and The Mary Baker Eddy Library celebrated in May its achievement of the “One Ream Dream”—a goal set out a year earlier by a small “Green Team” of employees. The church successfully decreased the amount of paper used for office printing by more than one ream (500 sheets) per on-site employee, resulting in a total savings of almost 350,000 sheets of paper during fiscal year 2012.

“We don’t want to toot our own horn—lots of organizations are doing this,” notes Laurie Scott, the head of the Green Team. “We just wanted to gently shift the culture.” To that end, the team posted (on recycled paper!) tips for saving paper and ink near business printers around the organization, shared tips in employee bulletins for decreasing paper use, and made a short video encouraging employees to conserve resources. The average TMC employee now uses about 3,300 sheets of paper for printing each year—less than a third of what the average American office worker uses (see, for example, “Office worker paper waste,” http://bit.ly/MH2zlA).

The Green Team’s efforts came at the same time as a push from the organization’s Technology Services Group toward an online system of document sharing and collaboration. Documents that used to be printed out and shown to co-workers are increasingly shared and edited online, as well as used during meetings in lieu of hard copies.

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