If you're with a large company, outfits like IBM, HP and Dell have got your green IT projects covered. But what about DIY small business types?

In "Green IT: Reduce Costs and Increase Customers" Polly Traylor spotlights a firm, Surf Technologies that was awash in paper. Not necessarily drowning in it, mind you, but just the act of storing it was costing the company in unforeseen ways.

She writes:

As an example, a Surf Technologies customer in the logistics industry had a love affair with paper: It maintained 600 filing cabinets of paper records for years, for no clear reason, according to Davignon. Through the help of his firm, the client plans to dispose of the records that are not needed, and scan the rest.

Going forward, the company will scan all records that need to be retained and place them on a storage area network. The firm could have determined years ago what the business truly needed to store from a legal and customer perspective – and for how long. Then, it could have created a document retention policy to dispose of paper records after a certain period of time, Davignon said.

She also lists some helpful tips that may present an unsettling shift at first but pay handsomely in the long run and will help boost your image as a company.