How eSignatures are Saving Our Planet

Take a minute and look around you; You will see tonnes of papers in our daily lives.

It isn’t easy to imagine a world without paper!

We use paper for data storage, print newspapers, magazines, keep track of transactions, and so on. Students use it for studying, research with books and notebooks, as well as extra notes. Offices use it for printing and storing different records physically. If you visit a post office, you can see that every collected mail is paper made.

According to the researchers, human activity led to the destruction of 15 billion trees every year, reducing the green cover on our planet by 46%.

A paper may appear harmless to you! But in reality, it has caused more significant environmental damage to our planet:

• Deforestation: 9,541,559 hectares of forest were cut down or burned globally in 2021, which has a whopping 11.3% contribution to global emissions
• Pollutants: Paper & pulp industries are responsible for producing 100 million kgs of harmful contaminants like SO2, H2S, CIO2, CO every year
• Waste disposal & recycling: Paper waste disposal & recycling is the main problem as 40% of the total waste is paper waste contributing to 71.6 million tons of waste annuall

Now let’s look at some of the official use of paper:

• An average employee uses 10,000 sheets of paper every year
• Sending details on paper costs up to 31 times the original price (printing, copying, postage, storage, filing, recycling, etc.)
• Each year 7.5 billion documents produce 15 trillion copies of the original documents.

The most prominent observation from the above statistics is that the more you use paper, the more demand is created in the paper industry to produce them every day.

What if we reduce our paper consumption, go green to save substantial operational costs, and transform your company into an eco-friendly company?

How to achieve this feat superfast? The answer is using esignature applications.

Here is how esignatures are saving our planets:

• Get rid of storage concerns

A standard piece of paper uses cellulose wood fiber strengthened and glued together by strong hydrogen bonds. Suppose the storeroom having paper documents is exposed to hot, moist, and wet conditions. In that case, they are easily destructible—such concerns associated with paper storage force organizations to keep the paper documents in temperature-controlled environments. As paper documents take huge space, such document storage facilities come at mammoth annual costs.

Businesses using eSignatures don’t have to worry about storing paper documents, as documents are stored in electronic format using secure cloud storage managed by third parties like Google, Microsoft & Amazon.

Companies using eSignature solutions save huge costs (power, rental & maintenance bills) associated with the storage of physical documents and make a remarkable contribution in reducing the toxic fumes emitted by power plants, preserving natural resources, and protecting habitats from degradation.

• Eliminate paper wastage

Some documents are printed, copied, and mailed multiple times to fulfill a company’s requirements, but employees often print unwanted copies of the papers unnecessarily.

It also happens that people require several copies of the document for different purposes and carry document copies with them. The best examples are students using temporary notes for their examination, doctors’ prescriptions for illness, old newspapers, paper bills after shopping, paper envelopes used for mailing paper documents, and many more.

When the purpose of these documents is over, then they are thrown off in the dustbin.

The result is excess paper wastage.

Electronic signatures enable users to sign documents electronically rather than print, sign, scan, and return them by mail.

Companies can actively put a curb on paper wastage using eSignature systems and help our environment breathe better.

• Reduce harmful emissions from vehicles

An important use of paper is to sign essential contracts and agreements.

There are several instances when the new contract has to be sent to an individual for signature and then sent back to the company. Often, the parties associated with the contract or agreement must travel to a familiar location to complete the deal. They have to use train, flight, personal, or transport services to travel or send the paper documents to the owner or receiver.

If you are using transportation services to travel, send or receive the contractual documents, you actively contribute to multiplying the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, extreme weather conditions, wildfires, droughts, and a lot more.

eSignatures reduce harmful emissions from vehicles by esigning essential contractual documents without moving out from your location.

• Get rid of plastic ballpoint pens and refills.

Plastic ballpoint pens are everywhere. They are at home, work, and school, but they are just as polluting as plastic bags and straws because as the ink runs out, you have to throw it away.

All disposable plastic pens and refills contain toxic materials like lead, end up in waterways, landfills, and other places with the harmful content trickling down to the soil and the groundwater table, causing considerable damage to the natural reserves and aquatic life.

As ballpoint pens are not biodegradable, they are a big nuisance for the environment as they can take more than a century to decompose. Nowadays, we have already started seeing the ill effects of plastic in our environment, like microplastics found in fruits & vegetables and plastic getting into the gut area of animals.

eSignature helps you get away from the daily issue of writing documents with a plastic pen. You can create and esign the documents online. If businesses use eSignatures, they can minimize stationery expenses in the workplace. Secondly, they can do their bit in ensuring a greener environment by using fewer plastic pens wherever necessary.

• It helps reduce electronic waste.

Several electronic products come towards the end of their product life, are irreparable, and have to be thrown away. Offices use computer monitors, printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines, and many electronic devices. Such old hardware can be recycled and disposed of properly. But if not done correctly, they have a horrible effect on the environment as they are non-biodegradable and can lay as indestructible waste on earth for centuries.

How?

When electronic waste is warmed up, toxic chemicals are released into the air damaging the atmosphere, causing colossal damage to human blood, kidney, and central nervous systems.

Organizations using eSignature solutions have significantly less dependability on external hardware devices for the daily task of printing, scanning, and mailing the documents. Employees can use the electronic signature application to create-edit-eSign-Email the documents. It eliminates the need for printers and scanners and helps the companies to do their bit in safeguarding the environment from e-waste.

eSignatures reducing carbon footprints and protecting the environment are not the only benefits of eSignature solutions.

Here is how your business can benefit from eSignature solutions

• Legally recognized

eSignature applications are lawfully recognized by countries worldwide as the ESIGN Act and the eIDAS Act. These laws help your organization to do business globally.

• Improved Customer experience

You get instant access to services using eSignature solutions. Waiting time to activate a service like opening a bank account, shopping online, or SIM activation reduces from weeks to few hours, resulting in improved customer experience.

• Increase in productivity

eSignature technology helps increase productivity as it lets you focus on essential tasks by avoiding time taking activities like printing, scanning, copying, and mailing physical documents.

• Positive return on investment

You get a lot of direct savings after switching business operations to a paperless workflow. 81% of digital signature users saw a payback in 12 months or less, and 25% saw ROI in three months or less.

CONCLUSION

Are you looking to make your business greener and eco-friendlier in 2021? Learn here how LunarPen benefits your business to achieve swift digital transformation. We are the global leader in eSignature applications and help business organizations manage proposals, NDAs, contracts, and agreements. Our mission is to assist you in digitizing processes in which we are experts while maintaining the protection, confidentiality, and legality of your business operations at all times.