Office Paper

How we use (and reuse/recycle) office paper is one of the areas of greatest impact our staff can have on the budget and the environment with relatively little effort. Below are some statistics to get your attention and convince of a need for change followed by what you can do about it at the office and at home.

Americans throw away enough office paper each year to build a 12-foot high wall stretching from New York to San Francisco — approximately 10,000 or more sheets per person.

It takes more than 1.5 cups of water to make one sheet of paper. (Picture a typical soda can.)

Reducing paper use reduces greenhouse gases: 40 reams of paper is like 1.5 acres of forest absorbing carbon for a year. (1 ream = 500 sheets)

The MELG building consumes about 200 reams of paper each month. That's about $600 just in paper each month!

Up to 60% of office paper is wasted in printing emails, duplicates, and read-then-discard jobs that could be done electronically or printed on scrap paper.

What you can do

• Don't print out emails unless you have to.
  If it's just something you're going to read, then discard/recycle, consider saving the paper or printing it on scrap.
• Print double-sided any time you can.
  Make a habit of asking presenters and thinking double-sided on materials (and don't forget, PowerPoint can print multiple slides per page).
• Save archives digitally instead of on paper.
  This not only reduces waste but saves physical storage space and becomes digitally searchable by name, date, etc.
• Print on scrap paper whenever possible.
  The MASA office, for example, keeps its manual feed tray loaded with scrap paper normally. So, if you're printing something that doesn't need to be saved or presented, consider selecting the scrap paper tray.
• Consider "paperless meetings."
  It's already been successful in many venues. Make presentation material available digitally before the event, and let participants print their own materials. This distributes printing costs and eliminates the over-run on printing that speakers/coordinators do for unknown participant turnout.