Sustainability: How Many Trees Do Digital Signatures Save?
Sustainability: How Many Trees Do Digital Signatures Save?
Let's start simple: Each tree can produce about 8,333 sheets of paper. The average Danish company uses 10,000 sheets per employee annually. That's more than one tree per person, just for regular office paper.
But contracts are worse.
The Hidden Environmental Cost of Contracts
A typical contract isn't printed just once. It's printed for review, corrected, printed again, copied for all parties, archived in multiple copies. A simple employment contract can easily use 20-30 sheets when the entire process is done.
Add transportation. The average business contract travels 150 km from sender to recipient and back. By car or mail. That's CO2 from both paper production and transport.
A medium-sized company with 50 employees handling 500 contracts annually? They use paper from about 36 trees. Every year. Just for contracts.
The Bigger Picture
But paper is just the tip of the iceberg. Consider:
Ink cartridges: 3-4 cartridges per 1000 contracts. Each cartridge takes 3 liters of oil to produce.
Filing cabinets: Metal extracted from mines, processed, transported. And they fill up offices.
Energy: Print, copy, scan. A printer on standby uses power 24/7.
Wasted time: Okay, not directly environmentally harmful, but all that extra commuting to handle paperwork? That's gasoline and time.
The Digital Solution (Isn't Perfect)
Let's be honest - digital solutions use resources too. Servers require power. Cooling data centers uses water. But the difference is enormous.
Modern data centers like those ePact uses run on 78% renewable energy. A digital contract uses about the same power as having a light on for 12 seconds. Compare that to the entire print-copy-transport-archive cycle.
Microsoft calculated that their cloud services reduce carbon footprint by 93% compared to traditional on-premise solutions. For digital signatures, the savings are even greater.
What Does This Mean in Practice?
A client recently told us they saved 127,000 sheets of paper in one year with ePact. That's 15 trees still standing in the forest. 2.3 tons of CO2 not emitted.
For perspective: That equals driving 11,500 km in an average car. Or flying Copenhagen-London roundtrip. Four times.
And that's just one medium-sized company.
Small Steps, Big Impact
Sustainability often feels like something big and intangible. Climate summits. Global agreements. But the truth is, every digital contract makes a difference.
Next time you send a document for digital signature instead of printing it, you've just saved:
- 10 grams of CO2 per page
- 10 liters of water
- Enough energy to charge your phone
It might not sound like much. But multiply it by all the contracts, all the companies, all the days of the year.
Suddenly, digital signatures aren't just about efficiency. They're about the world we leave for the next generation.
And it feels pretty good knowing that every time I help a client digitize their processes, there's one more tree standing in the forest.
