The first ever National Sustainability Summit was held on November 3rd in Ireland’s Aviva Stadium. With over 1,000 attendees and 100 exhibitors, it provided those passionate about sustainability, sustainable business practices, and ‘going green’ an opportunity to network and discuss this increasingly pressing issue. The Aviva Stadium was alive and buzzing with four workshops and one main stage dedicated to talks and presentations led by individuals and organisations from a variety of industries including: energy, construction, food, data, transport, water and corporate social responsibility.

The purpose of the Summit was to create a forum for business leaders, entrepreneurs, regulators and government to examine business opportunities in the emerging green economy and to showcase how sustainability challenges can be tackled to achieve sustainability goals.

Sustainability is no longer an additional ‘nice-to-have’ for organisations; 49% of CEOs say that it is now a top 3 company initiative. For this reason, we headed down to the Summit to showcase how Nitro can help businesses to transform into paperless offices and become more sustainable workplaces.

Our very own Director of Marketing EMEA, Rebecca Lauder delivered a presentation on Sustainability in the New World of Content and Documents. Rebecca discussed the sustainability issues encountered by organisations as a result of poor, unsustainable document processes. Rebecca also highlighted the damage being done to the environment by organisation’s paper usage as well as the damage that they are doing to themselves; paper-based document practices hinder companies in terms of costs, productivity and document security. Many of the attendees at Rebecca’s talk could relate to the issues that were covered and learned a lot about how products like Nitro can enable organisations to meet their sustainability goals in ways that they may have never explored before.

We set up for the day at stand 20 beside the main stage and there was a heavy flow of traffic from the get go! We chatted to businesses big and small about the various sustainability challenges that they have encountered. We also had a number of people take part in our paper survey and discovered an unsurprising fact; 61% of organisations believe that waste reduction (ie reduction at source) is the most important sustainability initiative for their company, while 42% also said the energy and electricity costs are an important factor in reaching their sustainability goals.

Here are some additional insights we gained through surveying Summit attendees:

• Almost 40% of respondents print more than 10 documents per day, with 15% of respondents printing more than 30 documents per day.
• Approximately 60% of those surveyed said that the main reason they print is to review documents and make mark-ups. This is due to the fact that they do not have access to the right tools to do this on their computers. A further 44% of respondents said that they need to print documents to sign them.
• Paper-based processes can be seriously time consuming. We found that 88% of respondents spend between 30 minutes and 4 hours on administrative and paper based activities per day. And a further 9% said that they spend more than 5 hours per days on such activities.
• We discovered that 64% of those surveyed must process their documents manually before filing them. This generates storage and filing costs, decreases productivity as time is wasted filing, misfiling and recreating paper documents and also leads document security risks.
• We also discovered that paper is costing businesses thousands every year; 33% of respondents said that their organisation would spend between €11k and €500k on paper per year while 6% spend over €5M per year on paper alone.

If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a sustainable workplace, becoming a paperless office, or increasing document productivity why not sign up for our webinar Document Management and Sustainability in the Workplace or take a free trial to see how Nitro Pro can help your organisation today.