How CSHQA is Reducing Our Footprint Part I

If your office went (almost) paperless, how many trucks of recylable paper might you fill?

On the eve of our move to new offices at 2^nd & Broad I am both excited and amazed.  The choice to remodel a 50+ year-old warehouse was gutsy – kudos to our leadership.  But the steadfast commitment to this sustainable choice and all its ramifications borders on the epic.  Walking the talk involves three stages:  Reduce what you have, design for smaller, work smarter.

Reducing What You Have

Purge the archive.  When you’re pushing 125 years old you have some stuff in storage.  We wish it could have been a treasure trove of antiques.  It was a behemoth of paper.  Files, drawings, documents.  Sorting, scanning and shredding these documents was a nearly full time job for two people for more than a year.  2 man years.  That didn’t include the paper in everyone’s desk or personal flat file.  We each worked on that bit-by-bit for several weeks.

Recycle.  We have a paper-recycling cart nearly the size of a Mini Cooper.  At the peak of the office purge it was full every day for a month.  A typical dump truck holds 27 cubic yards of material.  I think it’s safe to say, including the archives, we filled the equivalent of three or four dump trucks with recyclable paper, magazines, files and drawings collected over several decades.  I think it’s also safe to say we will never repeat this feat.  Digital applications, storage hardware and the cloud are finally catching up with the reflexive tendency to hit the print button.  We truly are thinking twice.

Repurpose.  Admin set up a give-away table.  The only caveat – the new owner had to take it home, NOT to the new office.  House plants, dishes, paper goods, carpet samples, books, binders, jewel cases, small lamps, foot rests, posters, pictures, funky awards, and a crock pot(!) all found new homes.  Excess furniture, chairs, desk lamps, shelves, monitors, old computers…they found new homes too, by donation or contribution to the party fund.

Go paperless.  For some time CSHQA has made a concerted effort to print only when needed, edit in digital, store final copies on the server, and skip in the in-house copies on everything from timecards to proposals.  More software, more training?  Perhaps.  Greater efficiency?  Absolutely.

It’s been a liberating experience, seeing the nearly ‘empty’ desks poised for moving day.  It’s a good thing, too, because space-wise our new office definitely has to do more with less.  Today we have a staff of 70 in about 18,800 sf, plus an additional 12,000 sf of shared building amenities that include bike storage, lockers, trash room, server room, conference center and penthouse patio.  So, roughly 30,000 sf of accessible space.  The new office of 19,100 sf will accommodate up to 90 and still include conference, bike, trash, server, and patio amenities.  Learn how we designed for this smaller footprint in Part II.