We know, we know – yet another "green" media outlet. Seems we're all flooded nowadays, in both our personal and business lives, with a constant barrage of green messages. There's even an entire television channel devoted to being green (Planet Green, Discovery Communications).

Not that the greening of our businesses isn't a worthy and noble endeavor. Seems we’ve made a good mess of things until recently and it's time we took notice of what we may be doing to the environment. This seems especially pertinent if, as many scientists are saying, the environment is mounting a counterattack.

This site may be a bit different from the other green business resource sites because it focuses on a single activity that just may turn out to be one of the greenest things you can do in your business, not to mention making significant economic contribution as well.

Ironically, it's one of the least mentioned suggestions for making your business, and subsequently all our lives, greener. Even stranger is why it gets so little attention since it may be green in TWO ways – as friendly to your bottom line as it is to the environment.

It’s all about digital, online-based file transfer, also known as file exchange, file sharing, FTP, and other terms. If you Google file transfer and green you'll come up with less than five or six relevant articles or mentions of file transfer as a legitimate green initiative. Check out About.com's "10 Ways to Green Your Business" – file transfer doesn't crack their top ten. What about FastCompany.com's "50 Ways to Green Your Business"? Nope, not even a mention in the so-called top 50 ways. We don't understand this, so this site is going to speak up for what we consider one of the biggest oversights in the green movement.

It's true that some file transfer doesn't involve much in the way of carbon savings. Many files that are transferred end up being printed, and many of those files end up being shipped by overnight delivery. There’s no argument this involves staggering amounts of ecologically incorrect activities, like excessive ground and air transportation, not to mention packaging that may include the entire unholy trinity: paper, plastic, and metal. There’s also the energy expended in running the servers, routers, switches, and desktop computers that are all involved in the file transfer process.

And then there's examples like this: a midwestern construction management firm reported recently, in January 2009, that they brought slightly more than $23,000 extra to their bottom line over the previous 8 months exclusively due to their use of file transfer. This is not a large firm, so the $23,000 represented a reasonably large chunk of their costs (now profits). But that's not the whole story. You have to ask WHY they saved more than $23,000 and here's where it really gets good. Seems the savings came directly from cutting out a large portion of their overnight and 2-day delivery service, as well as significantly reducing their reprographic expense of printing out large format plan sets. Seems some of their crews and contractors in the field now grab their plans right on the job site, directly from their file transfer solution, and read the plans from their laptops or on site desktop systems.

What about the example of the west coast architectural firm? Seems they were commissioned, in August of 2008, to redesign the exteriors of the convenience and gas outlets for a major oil company. Rushing to meet a deadline the firm finally finished all of the preliminary plans but also needed to get them out to 24 different corporate and branch office locations of their client. In the past this would have meant outputting 24 sets of D-size plots (that's a very big sheet of paper), packaging them in shipping tubes made of corrugate, plastic, and metal, and then shipping them via truck and air transportation to 24 different locations. But they didn't do that this time. This time they uploaded one digital file containing all of the plans, to their file exchange site and, from the same site, notified their 24 would-be recipients that they could download the plans and view them in their offices. Not only did they actually earn (as opposed to buying them) a LOT of carbon offsets that day, they also, conservatively, saved themselves a little over $100 per location in overnight shipping and reprographic charges.

Our initial sponsor, FileGenius, tells us that these accounts are not rare but quite common-place. Similar stories are recounted to them on a daily basis. We're not talking about using recycled paper instead of virgin, or being sure we turn our desktop computers off before leaving the office, or even the practice of using more hybrid propulsion systems in ground transport services. All of these things are important and do their part, but think about this for a minute.

File transfer didn't substitute a more eco-friendly substrate (recycled paper for virgin), recycled materials weren't used for the packaging, and the companies didn't opt for more efficient means of ground and/or air delivery. No, they COMPLETELY ELIMINATED the paper, the packaging, and all carbon expenditures for ground and air transportation. When you compare the ecological and economic aspects of file transfer with more traditional ways of transporting files and documents around, come on, you don’t even have to do the math, it’s just common sense. If every business were doing this it's difficult to conceive of the total impact, compared to other so-called green initiatives.

But every business isn't saving both their money and the environment through file transfer. Why? Well, one big reason is they probably don’t know about it; most of the green media sources out there never mention it. We said NEVER, and that's as puzzling to me as it may be to you now, if you've read this far. As we said, that's one big reason for this website.

Some organizations have a file transfer solution but it's so complex and archaic no one can or wants to use it, so they don't. Cost is one of the most commonly voiced objections and that's the biggest mystery of all. A comprehensive, easy to use, extremely secure (much more so than overland mail or delivery) file transfer solution often costs less than $4/day. That's less than $4/day FOR THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION, not per user. For less than the cost of ONE decent cup of coffee, for ONE person, a company could be reaping significant benefits from one of the most ecologically and economically efficient business tools out there.

We still can't figure out why no one else is shouting this from the rooftops. That's why we're here, to tell a story truly worth telling.