Making paper use a political issue

The Shrink project is asking governments to save paper directly in their own administrations and to create policies and laws that will reduce wasteful paper use by the wider society. We are writing to all national governments in Europe to ask them about their policies on paper and urge them to think about how they can encourage more efficient use of this precious material. We have set up a new area on the website here.

The Shrink project has so far aimed at individual paper users - and more than 12 thousand of you have pledged to use less paper. We have also targeted big paper using companies and created a gallery of case studies of business paper savings. But to make paper saving a society-wide concern, governments need to act.

Our argument to governments is that paper saving is:

• a good way to reduce our environmental footprint, 
• ethically necessary to ensure that we consume only our fair share of the world's resources, and
• financially prudent, creating budget savings and efficiencies.