We all know of the need to print important documents, assignments,
research and other things. However, have you ever stopped to think how many
times you printed something unnecessary that after a few days you did not use
anymore?
- Paper and paper products accounts for more
than 1/3 of all Canada’s waste.
- Canada uses 6 million tons of paper and paperboard
annually. Only 1/4 of Canada’s waste paper and paperboard is recycled.
- Approx. 324 L. of water is used to produce 2.25 pounds of paper.
-
As
many as 24 trees are required to make one ton of paper.
-
Global paper use has grown more than six-fold since 1950. One fifth of
all wood harvested in the world ends up in paper. Pulp and paper is the 5th
largest industrial consumer of energy in the world, using as much power to
produce a ton of product as the iron and steel industry. In some countries
paper accounts for nearly 40 percent of all municipal solid waste.
-
Average worldwide annual paper consumption is 48 KG per person.
After read these information, what about think before you print in the
next time? Besides the number, I bet you had not thought of how much energy is
spending in papermaking. Manufacturing paper
requires energy. That paper starts as a tree. The tree gets harvested,
transported some distance to a plant to get sliced up into chips. Those wood
chips are then transported to a pulp mill, which can be thousands of miles
away. At the pulp mill, the wood chips are ground into pulp, which gets
bleached and washed and sent to the paper mill to be made into paper.
Eventually, the paper is cut into the right size sheets for your laser printer,
packaged, and then shipped — again, maybe thousands of miles — to your local
office store.
The Challenge and CO2 emission
As each ream (500 sheets) of copy paper used is
responsible for 30.5 pounds of released CO2 reducing your use of paper by just
one quarter during 1 month will save 7.6 pounds pf CO2.
Remember,
recycling is good but reducing the amount of paper you use to begin with is
even better. You’ll save money and reduce carbon.
What
changes we can do:
Reduce
·
Only print what's necessary.
·
Make the point size smaller in your documents to reduce the number of
printouts.
·
Send people PDFs instead of printouts.
·
Don't overprint: find out how many people need to receive what you are
sending out.
·
If you are printing a document to review, edit, or
make comments, make them on-screen instead. You can do this with the “Track
changes” and “Insert comments” features in Microsoft Word. Speaking of Word,
another way to get more words on a page (and therefore use less paper when you
finally print) is to decrease your font size and change Word’s “generous” default margins so that there isn’t as much
white space surrounding your text.
·
If you really have to print, do it on both sides of
the paper.
·
Some printers have a booklet setting which prints
two-up pages on both sides of the paper, effectively giving you four on one
sheet of paper- a 75% reduction.
Reuse
·
Use the other side of printed sheets when documents are drafts, so you
can make notes, for example. Once you`ve used both sides of the paper, then you
can recycled it.
·
Cut scraps of paper and use them as notes.
·
Donate your old books, trade and consumer magazines to your local
library.
Recycle
·
Recycling saves 3 to 5 times the energy generated by waste-to-energy
plants, even without counting the wasted energy in the burned materials.
Making a ton of paper from recycled paper saves up to 17 trees and uses 50 percent
less water than does creating paper from virgin pulp
·
Recycling 1 ton of mixed paper saves the energy
equivalent of 185 gallons of gasoline
·
Recycling 54 KG of newspaper will save one tree.
Global consumption of wood fiber
for papermaking can be cut by more than 50 percent, reports a new study by the
Worldwatch Institute. This reduction can be achieved through a combination of
trimming paper consumption in industrial countries, improving papermaking
efficiency, and expanding the use of recycled and nonwood materials, according
to Janet Abramovitz and Ashley Mattoon, co-authors of Paper Cuts: Recovering
the Paper Landscape
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