The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency is setting the pace for Australia’s green future, but a new tender for the off-site storage and management of over 6000 boxes of physical records demonstrates a traditional approach to document and records management.

Established in 2007 by the incoming Labor Government to implement an Emissions Trading Scheme, a goal yet to be achieved, the new federal bureaucracy is following the practice of printing and storing its documents in boxes off-site with the requirement to physically recall them on demand.

The carbon footprint of the new off-site storage facility will be enhanced by the tender requirements that “air quality and ventilation is provided by extraction and exhaust fans,” “there is external lighting illuminating the perimeter,” and “no direct sunlight enters the site”

Other Australian state government agencies are convinced that a truly “green” approach to records management should involve embracing new technologies involving digitisation

According to the Public Record Office Victoria, “The benefits of this technology take-up is that management and cataloguing of documents can be effected by means of databases, and the techniques aid in the segregation of material, which ultimately will go on to further improve energy efficiencies associated with the maintenance of air conditioning regimes.”

Document automation specialist Kofax also believes that the automation of paper-intensive business processes can also improve energy consumption and support "green" initiatives that are high on government policy agendas, including Australia’s.

“By scanning and capturing documents when they first reach the enterprise, then delivering them into a digital archive, companies are reducing the costs associated with maintaining storage space, such as heating and cooling, as well as transportation and staffing, all of which can contribute to reducing an organization’s carbon footprint,” said Allen Carney, Vice President of Product Marketing at Kofax. “Kofax customer British Waterways, which is responsible for maintaining 2,200 hundred miles of canals through England, Scotland and Wales, recently used a Kofax solution to transform the information in 200 file cabinets into one terabyte of documents in SharePoint, which saved it the equivalent of $A1.8M.”

It notes in a recent report that “The French government has pledged to reduce its paper consumption by 50% by 2012. Denmark's Environmental Protection Agency has already cut paper use by 48%. The US Department of Energy found that paper production is the third most energy-intensive of all manufacturing industries and uses 14% of all energy in the industrial sector. Reducing paper consumption within the US federal government sector alone could save 342 million kilowatt hours of energy annually – enough to power 12,851 American houses for 1 year.

According to analysts Eco-officiency, "Current estimates show that 50-70 percent of space in an office is still dedicated to filing and storage of documentation.Once filed away, most of this documentation is never accessed or needed again. A further waste consists of papers printed and stored that really are never needed at all."

The Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency expects its physical records needs will grow for the next 5 years. It is looking to implement the outsourced storage solution from August 2011, in an arrangement that will be for an initial period of three years with two possible 12 month extensions.

Michael Carden from the National Archives of Australia, said, ‘There are definite benefits to having paper records available in digital form, including searchability and easy online access. These benefits should however be balanced against the costs of running the computer and storage systems that keep the records available, and the potential for digital data to be lost unless rigorous digital preservation work is undertaken. Some might argue that running a shelf full of paper is less costly over 100 years than the cost of constant computer hardware refreshing and data storage upgrades. But both forms of archiving definitely have their place.’