Replacing a paper-intensive government tendering system with an electronic service has reduced carbon emissions by 500 tonnes over three years in printing alone, according to the company that runs the service.

The implication for businesses is that emissions and costs can be reduced even by tackling relatively obvious inefficiencies.

The system in question is OGCbuying.solutions, an executive agency of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the Treasury. Previously it handled paper-based tenders, for all sorts of contracts ranging from new police bicycles to an Olympic stadium. Just one of these tender processes can result in warehouse-volume quantities of documents.

But for the last three years electronic sourcing specialist BravoSolution has been providing the system as a managed service, hosting electronic documents rather than storing paper ones.

“When we started running the system, the environmental impact was never part of the proposition,” Nader Sabbaghian, UK managing director of BravoSolution told BusinessGreen.com. “It was about modernising government procurement, reducing cost, increasing efficiency ad making the process more traceable.”

Nevertheless, Sabbaghian’s team estimates that over the three years it has removed the need to print 53 million pages – an equivalent to 500 tonnes of carbon emissions.

That does not include the cost and emissions saved in not transporting the documents which, had they been printed, would have been transported by courier.