one trillion wasted pages

Today is Blog Action Day, a plan to get everyone to blog about the environment on the same day, to see if it can ‘change the conversation’. It’s an interesting idea. The influence of blogs is as yet untested, and it’s a bit of an experiment.

For my own post today, I’m going to mention this report on printing that found that people throw away 45% of what they print out within one hour. Worldwide, this amounts to a trillion pages every year. The average UK office worker prints 22 pages a day. US offices use 15 million sheets of paper every five minutes.

My own tips for saving paper would be these:

• Email yourself stuff, or put it on a USB stick, if you need to take information home.
• I tend to print out confirmation emails and e-tickets, when all I actually need is the code. Put the code in the diary or notebook instead.
• I’m also a sucker for printing out a google map page instead of taking a map. I live in London, and you can get A-Zs of any size, so there’s no excuse for that. I’ve settled for the Moleskine city notebook, which has maps in the back.
• File stuff properly, otherwise you’ll end up printing things again rather than looking for it.
• If you do have to print things out, double side it.
• I do a lot of sub-editing or proofing, and this does need to be printed out and then thrown away. I use lighter paper and the printer’s economy settings where I can.
• Make sure your office recycles any paper it can. Having a recycling bin as handy as a litter bin helps. People will go for the nearest.
• Most important, just think. It’s printing without thinking that causes the problem.
• Go and look at Chris Jordan‘s images of waste paper, if you need a hand visualizing our paper habits.