Why Use Less Paper?

Using less paper can make the world a fairer place. By using more than six times the world average, most Europeans and North Americans are using far more than our fair share of the Earth's resources. Think how much better the world would be if current levels of paper production were used to make books for schools in poor nations instead of wasted office printouts and junk mail.  

Irresponsible paper production causes a wide range of harmful environmental impacts, so by using less of it you can reduce your pressure on forests, cut energy use and climate change emissions, limit water, air and other pollution and produce less waste. There are also negative social impacts and human rights abuses linked to paper production, particularly in southern countries. Reducing demand for paper will help to address these too.  

Using less paper can also save you money. The indirect savings can be 10 times the cost of the paper alone. These include reducing the costs of technology like photocopy toner and printer ink, paying for less storage space and filing equipment, slashing postage costs and saving time.  Paper is a valuable natural resource and using it carefully will make you feel better than being wasteful. Persuading other people to use less paper helps to develop a positive culture, rather than one in which waste and disposability are taken for granted. 

We are not advocating the use of alternative materials to paper, unless they are proven to have a smaller ecological footprint, and we encourage all paper users to work towards all the goals in our paper vision.

Here are a few shocking facts to get you thinking:

• Making a tonne of paper requires 98 tonnes of other resources (1).

• Making a tonne of paper uses as much energy as making a tonne of steel (2).
• Deforestation causes more climate change emissions than global transport (3).
• In industrial countries, the paper industry is the biggest user of water (4).
• 45% of all print-outs and photocopies are binned before the end of the day (5).
• North Americans and Europeans use more than 200kg of paper each per year, while the average African uses just 6.5kg (6).

Go on, pledge to use less paper!

If you want to help someone less fortunate than you, why not Share a Piece of Paper with them?

(1) Hawken, Paul & Hunter, Amory L. “Natural Capitalism.” Little Brown & Co., September 1999.

Liedtke C., Material Intensity of Paper and Board Production in Western Europe. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, August 1993.

(2) Making 1 tonne of paper and steel requires 8,000-11,000kWH. USA Environmental Protection Agency.

(3) Forestry causes 17.4% of global climate change emissions, transport causes 13.1%. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Assessment Report 2007, Synthesis Report, page 5: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.

(4) Taevs, Debra. “Recycling’s Pushed ‘Reduce, Reuse’ Out of Equation.” Portland Metro Sustainable Industries Journal, June 2005.

OECD Environmental Outlook, cited on http://www.environmentalpaper.org/PAPER-statistics.html

(5) 1 trillion pages are binned on the day they are printed, according to Xerox, reported in Guardian Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/oct/14/workandcareers.news

(6) World Resources Institute Earthtrends data: http://earthtrends.wri.org

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