The city of Indianola, Iowa isn’t the only municipal government that’s reducing paper waste by using iPads. The city of Vancouver, Washington is also saving lots of cash — and trees — by switching 54 city employees to Apple’s tablet.

According to this post in The Verge, the city has cut printing for council meetings by 40 percent, from 5,371 to 3,182 pages, just two months. And they’re saving big on their data plans too.

 The cost of connecting the devices also dropped: instead of paying $71 a month to connect each BlackBerry, the city now pays about $43 for each iPad data plan. That means each BlackBerry that’s traded in for an iPad saves $336 per year.

Ouch, that doesn’t spell good news for RIM. And with the expected release of an updated, HD version of the iPad today, I bet the crisp images produced as a result of better screen resolution boost will only help more government agencies go paperless.

Source: The Verge