EL Blog

We understand that for many this transition away from paper may be painful, but it is a necessary step toward a better and more productive life. Paper is a habit, best broken and many of the reasons for this should be obvious.

Paper Documents can only be in one place at a time. Paper must be read. You cannot do an accurate keyword search on paper. The list goes on and on and goes to the very health of the planet.

When we look around our room we find many traces of paper, some books, a few magazines, some printer paper, and perhaps a poster on the wall.

Each person in the United States uses 749 pounds of paper every year. In fact world consumption of paper has grown four hundred percent in the last 40 years. Now nearly 4 billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries on every continent.

Although we cannot drastically stop this paper usage as modern life is completely surrounded with all types of paper products from packaging boxes to tissue papers, what we can do is, stop paper wastage, use recycled paper, use less paper in our office and institutions.

As this is the age of computers and virtual files lets make our organisations almost paperless, lets believe in email, online forms, PDF and word documents.

As also Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is looking forward to a near-paperless world where we won’t want magazines, students won’t need textbooks, and paper forms will be redundant. It is a vision we have been told about before — the paperless office was supposed to have been the norm by now — but Gates is adamant that we are nearing a turning point.

“We’re right on the verge of something that could become mainstream,” he says. “We’re the people who’ve been saying this for a decade, but now we’re finally saying it’s near.”

In Gates’s world we will all carry information on tablet computers, which can be held like a clipboard, with a flat screen on the front.

Forms, text books, magazines and newspapers will all go digital, he says, with a childlike eagerness for the possibilities that this heralds. “There’s a group of students that are going to college during this decade who,

because they use the tablet in college, will, as they go into the workforce, think about the magazines they want to read and it will be obvious to them that digital is far superior,” he says.

“The encyclopedia was the first book to go. It’s way cheaper, way more up-to-date. It doesn’t smell as good, but otherwise we’re a winner.”

What’s certain is that with so much of our daily lives dependent on the material, paper is here to stay. Even email and the Internet haven’t yet slowed this demand.

So we cannot completely ignore the use of paper but as research advances and the environmental impact lessens, perhaps we’ll be able to live comfortably with paper for the next six thousand years provided we use paper wisely and try to go digital and paperless whenever possible.

What You Can Do

* Use cloth towels and napkins
* Read documents on your computer and print sheets on both sides.
* Recycle boxes, junk mail and cardboard packaging. Get removed from catalog lists
* Always Use recycled paper.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 3:16 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.