The Paperless Home

The problems this raises - namely energy consumption - has easy solutions. And if not solutions, then certainly easements: plug everything that can be shut down and "unplugged" when not in use into a power strip, which you turn off regularly. We have everything but our network devices plugged into power strips which are off nightly. Also our entertainment system is in a strip which is turned off when not in use. Minor appliances are unplugged when not in use. Cutting these off cuts down significantly on "vampire energy use."

Also, you can source your energy cleanly through companies like Green Mountain -- if you're unable to leave the grid completely by producing your own wind/water/solar power.

Small devices that need recharging can be plugged into small solar panels created specifically for the purpose.

Perhaps what it will take simply more education on the part of the general home-officing public on the best ways to reduce their energy consumption.

The last time I saw a phone book? That is a loaded question. I can't remember the last time someone used one, but the phone companies still insist on delivering them to every single home and apartment in Los Angeles. Where most sit outside never taken out of their plastic bag....

This is all good because as energy prices continue to sky rocket consumers will begin to demand elimination of power vampires. OR they will get ahead of industry and just start turning off the power completely through master switches and whatnot. I am a firm believer that this 'energy crisis' coupled with tightening credit is the greatest thing to happen to the US people. :)

Great post. Now can you tell us how to photograph a document and make it text-searchable? That would be SO useful

Thanks
Joanna

Joanna, it is difficult, but possible to do that with a camera. A high resolution camera would be needed. Best results would come if you use a mount or tripod to keep the camera still. See http://runeberg.org/admin/camera.html for more.

The best solution is to use a scanner, particularly a flatbed (as opposed to the portable feed-through style).

For turning the image into text, use an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. There are a number of programs available, both closed and open source. Some correction is always needed with these systems, but overall accuracy rates are good (for typed material, hand written or hand printed is a different matter).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

Why might the home be so far ahead of the office in becoming paperless? I think it comes down to being organized. In a home, you just have to get a few people to agree on a system. In an office, you have to get hundreds or thousands of people to do so.

There are definitely offices that are doing it, but they're well organized. And there are homes which are obviously unorganized as well. (I don't know if an engineering director at Google is your typical average person.)

The other thing to remember is backups. He mentioned he was doing backups, so the guy in the article is in good shape. But when he said that once he made something digital it was preserved forever, it's a little more complicated than that. That same roof leak he mentioned could easily destroy a hard drive. And hard drives don't last forever anyway.

And as the above poster mentioned, we obviously have to do better at energy efficiency and conservation.

That looks like a lot of silicon in the home... and probably plastic casing.

Shortage of silicon is creating a price war between Solar PV and electronics manufacturers. That's driving up the price of PV, and so as a matter of principle, I tend not so support a home suffused with electronics because of its detriment to PV.

As with all materials, humans have to be thoughtful of where we want to put our remaining resources. Should we continue to burn oil or use the petrol for plastics for medical purposes?

Paper is not the enemy here. I'd rather fight consumerism. Save the silicon for the PV.

Joanne,

It would be better to digitally scan a document which then can be made text searchable by an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program.

Photographing a document correctly for OCR programs to process is not an easy task.

try http://www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm -- it is a freeware distribution ie no cost to use

Sadly, telephone books have not gone away. Every year my apartment building gets a mountain of them from several different companies -- they leave way more than one book per apartment, too.

Thanks so much for replying. I was thinking that scanning would be better ... but had no idea about OCR programs.

I find it hard to believe that homes are more paperless than offices: not this one, anyway, there's hardly room for my laptop on my desk for all the piles of paper.

OCR may be the boost I need ;)

Joanna

So by going paperless I need 10 LCD screens just between the living room and kitchen? I barely use paper, and I surely don't have all that rubbish in that image. Buying so many screens has got to be way worse for the environment (e-waste anyone) than paper.

Screens = not well recycled in this country, non-renewable, expensive, contain hazardous chemicals

Paper = renewable, easily recycleable, non-toxic

How about we just reduce paper load significantly without the overconsumerism?

And then the power goes out for hours and you can't even read your favourite book by candle light since you forgot to charge the E Reader. :)

But seriously, the phone book issue seems more pressing on people's minds in the comment stream. It's so annoying to get mine delivered and not have a single use for it. Treehugger solutions?? Stop the companies from delivering it to all our doorsteps? Do not BOOK me service?? Montreal is swamped with them...

Thanks for the OCR link! My canon canoscan 4-400f (purchased because it has the ability to scan negtives and will work with my imac) came with the OCR software as part of it package but I had no idea what to do with it.

So excited. My job just got a little easier.

THANK YOU!

Joanna,
Where is all that paper coming from? Its much easier to get the documents electronically rather than scan and ocr them. Sign up for paperless billing and statements for any bills/banks/etc you deal with. I've been pretty much paperless for a while now.

Well then which is the lesser of the 2 evils? I face this issue daily in my attempts to be more green. Paper vs electronics, organic vs local, cloth diapers vs disposable diapers, etc..

I'd be thrilled to only get one phone book per year. I usually get 3 or 4, one from the phone company and the rest from other companies producing their own versions. Isn't competition wonderful?

For documents, I use a Scanner and simply import them as TIF images. I use TIF because it seems to be the easiest to process through OCR (optical character recognition) later. The only paper copies we keep are birth and marriage certificates and the court decree for my divorce from my first wife.

One thing not mentioned in this little article is Online Banking. By using online banking (provided by most large institutions), you can eliminate paper bills, bank statements and other announcements plus keep a better eye on your finances. I have all my bills sent to me electronically through my bank and simply pay them once a month in about 2 minutes. My bank statement is electronic as well. If I ever need a printed copy for any reason, I can just get it from any bank branch. This has dramatically reduced the paper coming into the home.

Now if only the local newspaper would invest in digital ink and allow me to get the daily paper on that with bluetooth integration, then I can elminate another incoming waste stream. The one thing that I have not embraced yet is digital books. There is something about relaxing on the couch with the paper pages of a book and a cup of coffee that a digital reader simply doesn't give at this time.

If only the paper in telephone books was more 'toilet friendly'. At least then I could find a use for the four a year I get rather than just chucking them in the recycle bin. Imagine the somewhat twisted fun of wiping with a lawyer's ad? Blowing your nose on the car dealerhsip section?
-Lego

Somebody needs to do a real analysis of resource usage. Energy isn't the only resource that goes into computers, and it doesn't help that they still get thrown out every few years. The idea that a new laptop will save the earth sounds a little too good to be true.

There's nothing worse than attending a meeting and the presenter has printed out copies of his 30-slide powerpoint for everyone.

Why don't people get it?!

"Well then which is the lesser of the 2 evils? I face this issue daily in my attempts to be more green. Paper vs electronics, organic vs local, cloth diapers vs disposable diapers, etc.."

Here's my quicklist greater-of-two-goods principles:

• Local over organics.
• Farmers markets over supermarkets.
• Cloth diapers augmented by disposable diapers for emergencies. Yeah, cleaning poop is yuck that we get used to.
• Bikes over light-rail over buses
• Energy conservation over PV
• Wind over PV
• PV over natural gas...
• As little paper as you can manage with as few electronics as you can manage (no robot dog, or Wii. e-readers for me are questionable)

• Preventive herbs and good sleep over drugs. Though for somethings, drugs are super useful. :)\

I have asked the phone book company not to send me anymore phone books but they did not even respond to my email and when I called them, they acted like there was nothing they could do. I try to live as electronically as I can and when I have to print something, to use both sides of paper and only print the pages that are necessary but feel forced to waste paper when they deliver the numerous phone books to my door. I may try posting a sign that I do not accept solicitations or free stuff of any kind on my door step (I do not even have my packages delivered here). Does anyone have any other ideas on stopping phone book deliveries (it bothers many of my neighbors also!)??

I would surmise that the phone books are a HUGE ancillary revenue source for the phone companies hence the reason that they keep on distributing them. Their promise to advertisers, and how they justify rates, is that one phone book gets distributed to each of their customers. It's the promise of eyeballs, but beyond that they can not guarantee anyone reads them.....only receives them. Like most things....it is all about the dollar. That's where we need to really think about what is happening. At what price and cost???? We have become so focused on profit and revenue that most just don't care about anything else. That is truly unfortunate....and it is just not the phone books, but nearly every other product and service delivered by a company.

I hate phone books. The phone company even has the nerve to charge extra if you DON'T want your number listed in their dead-tree tomes.

One solution might be to get a cell phone from a company that doesn't print books.

When I print, I use the back of printed sheets of paper I have salvaged from the garbage or recycling bins.

As wonderful as that seems, it's a bad idea for anyone to become TOO dependent on anything. Yes, it's a good thing to cut back on the amount of paper used, but why do it at the cost of living in a completely digital world? I don't know about anyone else, but I like to have pictures of the ones I love there in my house, not on computer.

And if you're going to go as far as to go "paperless" why not just learn to recycle? And not just for paper, for all materials.

There are some stores that sell scrap paper (of any kind: newsprint, scrapbook paper, watercolor paper, regular printer paper) - a lot of their inventory is donated from businesses and such. Their stuff is resold to (i'm assuming mostly) crafters and artists who can reuse the stuff. Even if they don't plan to resell donated phone books (they might be getting too many), they will probably still have a massive stash of to-be-recycled paper.
These stores probably only exist in larger cities, but I can't be sure. If you ask local crafters and artists, they will probably know.
If you're into art yourself, those columns of names provide endless possibilities 8^)

"why not just learn to recycle"

Our city has no recycling program and the suburbs won't accept it.
I also have no place to store it at home.
I also keep electronic copies and keep an off site backup, can't do that with paper easily.

My small low power laptop just past the 5 year mark but I may soon need a larger drive as my 120G is pretty full.

Going paperless has helped with clutter and storage. I store years worth of data on a tiny 2.5" drive in a laptop thats the size of a book, Its replaced whole filing cabinets worth of paper, books worth of photographs, and desks to sort it on. I've eliminated late fees from the usps loosing my payments.

I noticed the discussion with Joanna in which she said "can you tell us how to photograph a document and make it text-search-able" and I share the sentiment. That was one of the reasons why I founded www.vaultstreet.com.

VaultStreet automatically collects original PDF files from financial institutions and utilities for you. That way you never need to deal with the hassle of scanning and OCR (which is especially poor for financial documents). Plus VaultStreet is a truly end-to-end paperless system so the documents never ever need to be printed.

I like the Idea of the paperless home which would save logging of trees but one question, what about our important documents like our birth certificates?

We here at 1-800-FREE411 are doing our part to get rid of phone books. We encourage opting out of them entirely, if possible, or just immediately recycling them as soon as they arrive on your doorstep -- the more advertisers see how they're not being used, the quicker phone books will become obsolete. Heck, they're already obsolete -- you can get business, gov't, and residential listings via our number. Cost-free and paper-free, naturally.

Unfortunately I see phone books and newspapers sitting outside my building daily. People aren't even picking them up, so there is no way they could possibly be using them. I have been trying to get paperless billing for the longest time.I go to their sites, sign up for it, and then I get a bill in the mail. It's nice they have the options on their sites, now it is about execution (at least in my case).

Joanna,
There is a program available to convert printed pages into editable text using your digital camera. It's called TopOCR. Simply take a picture of a document and in seconds this program will convert it to text for you save. No need to use a copier. You can even use the camera on your cell phone. Amazingly, the program is free! It's available at www.topocr.com