Green Initiatives

From the time you wake up until your head rests upon your pillow at night, think about the amount of paper that you will come into contact with and then throw away. You may be shocked at your assessment of this overwhelming fact. Paper products are everywhere. But do we realize the impact they have on our environment, from the harvesting of trees, the manufacturing and then the waste or disposal.

Here are a few facts:

Less than 1/3 of our paper is manufactured from recycled sources, and in the U.S., 99% of the virgin fiber used for paper manufacturing comes from trees.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that by 2010, worldwide paper and paperboard consumption will increase 90% from 1993. This equates to a consumption level of 528 million tons.
U.S. businesses throw away 21 million tons of paper every year, the equivalent of 175 pounds per office worker.
On average, every American consumes over 730 pounds of paper a year, making the U.S.
the world's greatest paper consumer. A 12-foot high wall stretching from New York City to
Los Angeles could be built with our annual office and writing paper waste.
The 300 million rolls of fax paper we use each year is enough to go from the Earth to the moon 26 times.

Maybe its time we re-evaluate our dependency on paper
and what we can do to make a difference.

Benefits of Recycling

Recycling one ton of new paper translates into the savings of:

17 mature pulp-producing trees
78.75 gallons of oil
7,000 gallons of water
41,000 Kilowatt hours of energy
Additionally, air pollution is reduced by 60 pounds and three cubic yards of landfill space are conserved.

If each copier in the U.S. made 5 fewer copies a day, we could save up to 1.4 million trees.

Paper fibers can be recycled about six or seven times before they begin to disintegrate.

What Simple Things You Can Do:

Follow your office/company recycling program and if there isn't one - insist one be developed and implemented.
Consider buying recycled office/paper products.
Whenever possible, print double-sided.
Use the back of old documents as scrap paper.
Send electronic copies instead of paper and suggest that recipients don't print a copy unless absolutely necessary.
Preview documents on screen and consider if they really need to be printed.
Copy materials only as needed.
Initiate an electronic filing system for documents that may be needed often or if multiple persons need copies of.