ORLANDO -- A local attorney has made a unique New Year's resolution to do away with paper.
"Life's been a lot easier. It's nice not having the paper everywhere," said attorney Richard Hornsby, who has resolved to reduce his carbon footprint by going paperless in 2009.
With big cases, courts have often dealt with hundreds of pages in documents, but in a move toward becoming more green, courts and lawyers have begun doing away with hard copies, an eco-friendly trend that Hornsby said he is determined to follow.
Hornsby said a high-speed scanner was a must, along with a handheld Internet connection. From there, all he said that is left was to start doing it.
"Being a lawyer, everything you do is paper-related," Hornsby said. "Just the amount of things you have to print out, whether it's research, client-related, whether it's a discovery -- just paperwork everywhere."
Hornsby said he is digitizing every case file, receipt and business card, replacing mountains of paperwork with a simple e-mail.
"It makes life much more efficient, much more manageable," Hornsby said.
An Orlando native, Hornsby said he has invested a lot of his own energy into trying to get out the word about how to keep his hometown environmentally conscious.
"Other places are obviously worse than us, but being that we have such large populations, there's a lot more we can be recycling," Hornsby said. "If each person puts in their own effort, I think over time, as a group, we will make a large difference."
The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year.
The U.S. alone, which has less than 5 percent of the world's population, consumes 30 percent of the world's paper.
Over 40 percent of wood pulp goes toward the production of paper.
Phasing out paper may have attorneys like Hornsby embracing cyberspace, but for the rest of us, it leaves a much smaller imprint on our environmental landscape.
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