SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

For agencies requiring 5 day coverage and who are working 5/8 hr shifts. Split the crew into two crews. Change the shift to a 4/10 hr shift. One crew will work M-Th, the other crew work T-FR. This will increase coverage to 10 hrs a day, for 5 days a week without increasing labor cost. It will reduce fuel consumption and green house gas emissions for crews that travel to remote sites driving government vehicles by... more »

At Social Security, we spend most of our time interviewing and working with the public. The most time consuming portion of our day is compiling and sending notices for documentation requests, close outs of leads, and other necessary activities. Members of the public should be given the option of receiving their notices and forms by email, especially when claims are submitted via internet. This would allow for faster processing... more »

Make electronic faxing available directly from the electronic charting system ( CPRS). If a patient/hospital/physician office requests medical records from the VA- you can select and fax without doing multiple steps:print the records out, cover sheet and fax saving time, money and paper.

As a government agency, we should encourage all of our employees and patients to help conserve the resources of the world by truly promoting recyling (having a thorough recyling program) as well as composting (for agencies with cafeterias i.e. Veterans Canteen Services). How can we expect for our fellow citizens to be environmentally friendly if we are not following our own advice.

Facilities should buy the printer and paper that produce documents that fade away after 16-24 hours. This paper could be re-used multiple times, reducing a huge amount of paper waste, as many times a piece of paper only contains a few lines of print and should be re-used as much as possible. Much of the information printed is only needed for a short time, but for other items such as letters, standard printers could be... more »

In our canteen, we are using Styrofoam plates and plastic silverware. If this is true for the canteens throughout the country, then this needs to be fixed. The amount of trash this creates just from one day of lunch is enormous. That’s not very green!
Why can't we use the trays similar to the ones we used in high school and elementary school. The hard plastic reusable trays. They would only require a high heat wash like... more »

The U.S. has more than 45,000 miles of Highways. The median strips are often clear of trees and get sunlight for much of the day. If we assume that only 1/2 of them have median strips that could feasibly have solar panels, that translates to more than 50,000 acres of land that could be used for solar power generation.

Assuming an average of 90Kw per acre (based on the capacity of the Davidson County Solar Farm in North... more »