Why Should I Care About Paper Use ?

There are many reasons why you might want to reduce the amount of paper your office uses. These can be broadly divided into environmental, economic, and other advantages. While many of the reasons are compelling, often the dollar savings are most influential. Changing paper habits requires spending some time and sometimes money, so dollar savings help justify it as a wise investment.

Environmental Issues

A common environmental concern around paper is for landfills; even with the presence of effective recycling programs, a considerable amount of paper still ends up buried. With each round of recycling, some fibers are lost, all of which means a considerable amount of wood is required. Paper also takes a considerable amount of energy to produce, and while much of this is derived from the trees themselves, there is still a significant energy benefit to reducing paper use. The role of paper in global climate change (forestry, paper production, use, and disposal) is complex, but reducing paper use helps alleviate our climate problems (see our scientific references for further information on paper and climage change). Producing paper has land-use and forestry impacts, and the pulping, bleaching, and paper-making processes produce a variety of harmful emissions. While people argue about the exact size of the environmental benefits of using less paper, there is no question that we always come out ahead.

It takes the equivalent of about 17 Watt-hours (Wh) of electricity to make a sheet of paper from wood (and about 12 Wh for 100% recycled paper). (See our scientific references for details). This means that the manufacturing energy for the 5 sheets an hour typically used by office workers is about the same as that needed to run an 80 W bulb for the same hour. However, paper is more expensive than electricity per kWh and so the five sheets/hour costs about as much as the electricity cost of four 80 W bulbs. Using five sheets per hour is 10,000 per year, which costs about $50 to buy in the U.S.

Economic Issues

On the economic front, the U.S. as a whole spends a considerable amount of money buyingpaper, and an even larger amount in the course of usingthis paper. This is particularly true for office paper, where costs such as printing, copying, storage, and mailing overwhelm the paper purchase cost. Saving money by reducing some of these expenditures is an important rationale for reducing paper use.

Other Issues

A third type of benefit of the better use of paper is the qualitative effect on our businesses and lives. Whenever you have to carry stacks of paper a distance (such as when traveling), you become aware that having less of it to lug around makes life easier. When we have fewer sheets of paper in our homes and offices, we will spend less time looking for those that are misplaced or lost. Businesses are increasingly converting to electronic form, operations that had previously been paper-based. Many have found that the quality of information processing increases and the time it takes (both labor and total elapsed time) to process or summarize information drops precipitously.

We should always remember that reducing paper use brings an entire set of benefits. Some changes may have little effect on overall costs, and so environmental benefits can be the main motivation. In other cases, the dollar savings by themselves are compelling and so can take the lead.

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