Considering the green profile (or lack thereof) of common fax machines

I’m sure it won’t surprise you to hear I’m getting more and more pitches every day from information technology product and services companies eager to drape their particular offering in some shade of green. Whether or not that was the original intention.

The storage and data center crowd easily accounts for at least half of this outreach. But even topics some might consider decidedly un-sexy, such as fax technology, could be seen as having some sort of green angle.

I very rarely use a fax machine myself, usually relying on e-mail to scan and attach documents I need to send elsewhere. In truth, however, many, many small businesses and financial services agencies still use faxes heavily. That’s why I DO think that services intended to help manage fax workflows more responsibly do deserve an eco-mention here. So, OK, I’ll bite.

Because, of course, traditional fax machines are notorious paper wasters and energy drainers to boot.

FaxCore, which sells fax server technology, aims to address the first concern by keeping most of the documents you'd normally fax in an electronic form for record-keeping purposes and allowing you to print only what’s necessary.

As a sales argument, the company has calculated the cost of using its technology vs. sending something via the U.S. postal service. Consider, for example, a company that sends out roughly 1,000 letters per week. Between the cost of postage, paper/envelopes, and processing (i.e. the humans stuffing and preparing the envelopes), FaxCore estimates that the company could save $830 per mailing by using its fax service. (This assumes the average communication is roughly two pages in length.) Of course, I’m not sure that number accounts for the time spent prepping the fax transmission or the upfront cost of investing in the software and hardware for the FaxCore server. Neither does it really factor in the environmental upside in terms of trees saved or the impact of the stuff put on older fax paper to make it, well, fax paper.

That’s actually the argument being used by MyFax, which is encouraging companies to forgo buying a fax machine altogether and instead use their service, which simply requires e-mail. According to U.S. government stats put forth by MyFax, paper production is second only to petroleum in terms of energy used by U.S. industries. (A big no-no in the carbon dioxide emissions department.) Energy Star rates fax machines among the most energy-intensive types of business machines out there because most of the time they sit around turned on, basically doing nothing. Here's a page with more information and also with a link to a calculator so you can run your own numbers about the impact of fax machines.

As I was looking for some links to post this story, I stumbled across this coverage of a new report about "The State of the Paper Industry" from the Environmental Paper Network. Seems appropriate to reference it here.

I know that many small businesses find themselves somewhat stymied by the green tech dialog, especially since a lot of it focuses on addressing enterprise technology. But I believe we’ll hear a whole lot more about addressing fax machines and printers moving forward, because there are practices in the realm of energy management, and ink and laser cartridge recycling that are well within the power of smaller companies to address.