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Going Paperless with Nathan Grider
Nathan Grider, Director of ORC
IDNR Director of the Office of Resource Conservation Nathan Grider considers himself a fish and wildlife biologist. When he was young, he fished, hunted, and worked on a farm. He says, “being from a small town in central Illinois, it was pretty easy to explore the outdoors on the edge of town.” Eventually, Nathan’s love of nature became a drive to understand ecology, and he developed a passion for conservation.
Nathan was just nine years old when he started talking to people about conservation, “playing biologist a bit before I even knew what it was.” He fondly reminisces, “I loved playing in the creek near my house, catching critters, and trying to learn about them and their habitats.” This early curiosity turned into a passion for hunting, fishing, and conservation of all species and habitats.
After high school, he started volunteering with the IDNR, then went to college to eventually earn a master’s in biology. Nathan began at IDNR in 2011 as an intern but now serves as the senior manager for the Wildlife Programs Section in its Springfield office. Thinking about sustainability, he began an initiative to help his department use less paper. He brought the paperless initiative from his previous department, the Impact Assessment Section, where they had found success reducing the use of paper by moving more processes online.
Going paperless obviously helps save trees, but Nathan points out that the trees saved can continue to act as carbon sinks and help provide habitat for countless species. In addition, paperless offices reduce the amount of CO2 used to manufacture and transport paper, including shipping documents through the mail. A paperless office “touches everything,” according to Nathan: “efficiency, cutting costs, modernization of systems.” Paper also accounts for around 26% of total waste at landfills (WWF, 2022), and its manufacture is extremely water intensive: it takes “47 gallons of water [to make a] ream of paper” (Illinois Library, 2022).
One big success story Nathan and his colleagues had in their efforts to reduce paper use was with the IDNR Hunting Digest. They evaluated the increased use of the online version and the number of hardcopy digests remaining at the end of the hunting seasons.
“We determined we could safely reduce printing from 250,000 copies to 200,000,” Nathan reports.
“That’s approximately 1.6 million [fewer] pages used each year and shipped over the road and significant cost savings to the agency and tax payers.”
They continue to evaluate printing and distribution needs each year. The Fisheries Division has taken a similar approach with the Fishing Digest and reduced printing as well.
Another Wildlife Programs Section success story is the transition to electronic distribution of Nuisance Wildlife Control Operators (NWCO) and Nuisance Animal Removal Permits (NARP). Prior to 2023, the agency mailed approximately 700 NWCO reporting forms to these permittees, which were completed and mailed back to IDNR. Wildlife staff moved this whole process online with the Survey 123 reporting system in 2023. An online tool was also built for NARP permits, which saved an estimated 330 hours of staff time and moved over 2,000 permits a year from paper to electronic.
The final Wildlife Program to highlight is the turkey brood survey used to monitor the state’s turkey population. For decades, approximately 3,000 participants were mailed three postcards each to note turkey observations during the summer with some not being returned at all or returned undeliverable as folks changed their addresses. Dozens of staff hours were spent on mailing and hand entering the data received. In 2023, Wildlife staff moved the project to an online Survey 123 system, and while participation fell at first with the transition, reporting is back up to the same or slightly higher level than the paper postcards thanks to some strategic outreach.
These new processes save the department costs on paper, printing, mailing, and considerable staff time. Again, less paper means fewer trees cut down, preservation of water and wildlife habitats, reduction of GHG emissions, and carbon sequestration—which few things in nature are better at than trees. “The credit goes to the many staff … help[ing] stand-up these new systems and sharing the vision of modernizing our programs and setting a good example of natural resources stewardship,” says Nathan. He hopes to see more offices in IDNR move to paperless processes, which would help the department reach the ultimate goal of their Climate Action Plan: net-zero emissions by 2050.
Works Cited
Yousufi, Mahmood Khan. “Exploring Paperless Working: A Step Towards Low Carbon Footprint.” European Journal of Sustainable Development Research https://doi.org/10.29333/ejosdr/13410
WWF. (2022). Paper and pulp: Overview. Responsible forestry. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/deforestationfront
