Stop wasting that paper!

This has been bugging me since a real long time but it finally manifested into an outburst today when my 10 year old sister started using fresh clean A4 sheets for her 'artwork' as if there's no tomorrow! Seeing paper get wasted irritates me to no end! It just gets on my nerves! The kind of I-feel-like-I-want-to-do-something-to-make-it-stop feeling! The only other thing that irks me as much is someone scratching on the blackboard. It just drives me mad!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like wringing whatever I get hold of then!

So, why save paper??? For starters, the pulp and paper industry is the third largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. In 2005, out of 245,000,000 tons of waste 34.2% was paper according to the EPA. That is over 83,300,000 tons of paper that is wasted every year.

 

On your mark...get set..and

• Print only if its necessary.
• Use duplex printing option so that you print on both sides of the paper.
• Choose a printer friendly option while taking a printout of some web related article.
• Use the header to put the title and delete footer or reduce it's size so that you can fit in more content in one page.
• Print only necessary parts of documents rather than the entire thing.
• Do not throw away bad output of a printer or a copier machine. Keep them aside, you can always use them for something.
• Use technology and avoid the paper as far as possible. For instance, E-mails, Electronic file systems.
• Always use both the sides of a sheet even when you're writing something.
• For circulation in any organization, scan documents and email or upload them to a server accessible by all.
• For changing notices put up on notice boards, take an already pinned notice (which you want to remove anyway) and print on the blank side and put it up next time.
• You can neatly cut out unused tiny portions of the documents and use them as post-it notes.

There's no extent to how much you can utilize. It all depends upon your imagination! Of course, if you have a local recycling center, you can recycle all the waste you want else you can also sell your cartload of paper waste to manufacturing units that recycle paper.

P.S: Our college can lets us do our project reports by printing on both sides of the paper. Imagine the paper and money saved! Like it's a big deal if we print it both sides. It's easy to store it too!

P.P.S: Also in the professional business world, i don't understand why we can't print on both sides of the paper, for instance, resume, paper to be presented at a conference, a report and stuff like that.

We need to wake up and act fast by taking small steps at a time to save our planet. Let us all begin by using paper judiciously and save the trees!

Technorati Tags: save trees,wasting paper,go green,recycle