OIT Initiates 5% Less Campaign
Mary Schantz August 25th, 2009
The typical U.S. office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. How much paper is 10,000 sheets? In one large stack, 10,000 sheets of unused paper, weighs about 100 pounds. Last year, members of the College of Wooster Community printed and copied roughly 5,400,000 pages. That’s equivalent to 27 tons of paper.
The Environmental Defense Fund provides a paper calculator to help organizations and individuals understand the impact of paper usage. Click here to see a break down of our contribution and what you can do to help reduce paper usage on campus by 5%:
Wood Use:
27 Tons of paper = 100 tons of wood. That means it took 366 trees to produce the paper we consumed.
Energy Consumption:
In terms of energy consumption, 27 tons of paper = 807 Million BTUs. The Paper Calculator includes an energy credit for energy that is created by burning paper – or the methane that decomposing paper creates – at the end of its life. The Net Energy takes the total amount of energy required to make the paper over its life cycle, and subtracts this energy credit. If most of the energy used to make the paper is purchased, then the energy credit might make the Net Energy lower than the Purchased Energy. The average U.S. household uses 91 million BTUs of energy in a year. 807 million BTU’s is the equivalent of about 9 homes per year.
Greenhouse Gases:
Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels and methane from paper decomposing in landfills, contribute to climate change by trapping energy from the sun in the earth’s atmosphere. The unit of measure is CO2 equivalents. The average car emits 11,013 pounds of CO2 in a year. The production of 27 tons of paper creates 158,817 lbs CO2 - the equivalent of about 14 cars per year.
Wastewater:
Solid Waste:
Solid Waste includes sludge and other wastes generated during pulp and paper manufacturing, and used paper disposed of in landfills and incinerators. 1 fully-loaded garbage truck weighs an average of 28,000 pounds (based on a rear-loader residential garbage truck). The production of 27 tons of paper creates 51,535 pounds of solid waste , the equivalent of about 2 garbage trucks.
By using less paper, increasing recycled content, and making other improvements, we can save wood, water and energy, and cut pollution and solid waste.
What has OIT done to help reduce paper usage and our environmental impact?
1. Duplex printing is available in all public printing locations and most administrative and academic printing locations.
2. Scan-to-email is now available on all of our public devices. Scan-to-email is a great tool. The copier will create a pdf file of anything you scan and will send it to any email address you enter.
3. We are switching this year to recycled paper! OIT has partnered with Boise Paper to supply campus with Boise’s Aspen 30 product. Aspen 30 s a multipurpose office paper engineered for use in high-speed copiers, printers, and fax machines. It is acid-free and uses 30% post-consumer recycled content. We are also receiving the shipment in bulk coming straight from the manufacturer which also helps cut our carbon footprint.
4. We have eliminated 2 HP laserjets from the printing fleet that the IT staff utilize. This will help with our energy consumption as well as decrease our day-to-day printing.
What can you do to help? Join OIT in the effort to reduce paper usage by 5% this year. That’s 270,500 pages or 54 cases of paper. If you think about it, that’s only 1 ream per office on campus. 270,500 pages is equivalent to 1.4 tons of paper. That’s 36 trees, 42 Million BTUs or the energy consumption of 1 home, 8,235 lbs. Co2 of greenhouse gas emissions (one car), 31,106 gallons of wastewater and 2,672 pounds of solid waste.
Suggestions on what you can do:
1. Think before you print. ”Do I really need to print this, or do I have a copy electronically?”
2. Use scan-to-email. Instead of photocopying an article, scan-to-email. Scan-to-email is available on all of our public copiers and most of our administrative copiers. Scan-to-email can even replace sending a fax.
3. Print double-sided.
4. Use Woodle to post articles for courses instead of printing individual copies for class.
5. Take advantage of technologies that can help you share documents like wikis, blogs, email and network storage.
6. Watch for our posters and encourage each other to think before you print.
Together we can reduce Wooster’s footprint.