Mythbusters

Anyone living with their head under a rock might not have noticed that there's a climate change conference going on in Copenhagen at the moment. In honour of this fact - or maybe not in honour, but rather coincidentally - my office has sent around an email to explain what the company is doing to improve on our environmental performance.

There were all the usual things you'd expect; changing from the bottled water that used to get delivered weekly to filtered mains water, recycling bins around the office, advice to turn off computers when we leave for extended periods of time and to unplug any chargers left lying around. So far, so ordinary, and easily put into practice. In fact, most of these things, except perhaps the water, have been accepted practice for the entire time I've been at the company. It's the final aspect that has been most difficult to accept.

We have been advised to cut back our printing levels. Just to be clear, the paperless office concept has been around for a long time now. It has never made so much as a dint in the world of architecture though, unless you count the zeal with which young architects throw marked up drawings, criss-crossed with the red pen of their superiors, into the recycle bins bound to be scattered around offices. It only takes a moment to realise that it's not even our fault. While we design buildings that can run off the power of a sneeze, it takes thousands and thousands of trees dying to generate the documentation to get them built. Firstly, we have to supply the authorities with three sets of everything at A3, and often one at full size A1 as well (take your average A4 sheet, double that to get A3, double that to get A2...you get the picture, right?). The client always demands at least one set. Every contractor that tenders for the project gets their own set. There's a copy kept on file. Every time there is a change to a drawing, it has to be sent out again. Then, on the really big projects, there's the mother of all tree killers: the A0 set of drawings. 40 to 50 sheets, enough paper to keep New York's homeless warm and dry for a year. Paperless office? Yeah, we wish. We could issue all of this in electronic format, as PDFs. But twits ask us to print it. In fact, they require it.

The result could be seen as I wandered to the door tonight on my way out. One of the side effects of our new hours is a much closer relationship with the office cleaners. The directors have to lock up themselves, now, instead of employing security staff to do the job for them. So they can get home at a reasonable hour, the cleaners come around bang on our official finishing time. Where before they were faceless smokers outside, chatting to each other in Polish as they waited to come inside, now they are people. We talk to them, we are aware of the way they work. Seeing one woman going around the top floor with a squirty bottle and a rage, trying desperately to find a clear space to be wiped - and failing, for the most part to manage more than one squirt per pod - it occur ed to me to wonder just how much paper was being generated by the climate change conference in Copenhagen, and whether they'd come up with a solution to bureaucratic red tape. Somehow, I doubt it.