Records Storage: It Can Be Greener an You ink! by Pete Lorenco

Although they're popular colors right now, orange (it's the new black!) and gray (all 50 shades of it) have nothing on green, the color that's come to symbolize environmental stewardship.

Your company may give the nod to Earth Day each year, and you probably have green initiatives in play, such as encouraging employees to recycle at the office, turning off lights and keeping thermostats dialed down to a more environmentally favorable temperature. Perhaps you've taken even larger steps, like using fuel-efficient trucks in your fleets or cutting down on waste and implementing greener processes throughout your operations.

But as serious as you are about your environmental stewardship, you might be overlooking another substantial, and significant, way to further your sustainability goals. When you look at how your company manages its paper records, do you just see black and white or green? You can extend your environmental stewardship by working your sustainability goals into an offsite storage program.

What Green Really Looks Like

Think for a minute of all the paper records you amass and discard. The U.S. uses 69 million tons of paper and paperboard annually, with 20 million tons sent to landfills in 2013 alone. For the average business, paper record volumes grow at a rate of 22 percent annually; in just 3.3 years you can expect your volume to double.

Imagine the great respect and benefits you could bestow on Earth if you had a retention and destruction plan in place that made sure you keep what you need and securely destroy and recycle what you don't according to the greenest of guidelines.

Likewise, using recycled materials goes a long way to save the planet-and makes it a lot prettier as well. Consider the reams of paper your office runs through every month, then consider that a ton of paper made from recycled fibers saves 31 trees and 7,000 gallons of water and removes 60 pounds of pollutants from the air.

How Green Is Your Partner?

At Iron Mountain, we hold ourselves to lofty sustainability goals. By teaming with us, your company can turn your stacks of boxes and overflowing file cabinets into a shade of green-and we'll do all the work! Our efforts to be good environmental stewards include using 65 percent recycled content in our iconic storage boxes, recycling the tons of material we shred for our customers every year, investing in fuel-efficient trucks for our fleets and conserving kilowatts in our facilities.

As a result, we're saving seven million trees, sparing 1.3 million cubic yards of landfill space, and conserving 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Our sustainability commitment has earned us a spot on InfoWorld's Top Green 15 list, most recently in 2014.

We can help you turn a spring cleaning project into a platform to support your sustainability goals. You'll not only get some space back in your office, but your company will be in a better position to help save the environment.

Earth is looking greener already. (Take that, orange and gray!)

For more information, check out these infographics on responsible e-waste recycling and paper storage.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2015/service-lines/small-business/record...
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