I’m going paperless
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the damage done by deforestation (climate change, habitat destruction, salinity, etc etc). It seems that quite a lot of logging in Australia and South-east Asia is done for paper production, and although I’ve signed petitions and emailed corporations and politicians, I’m at the point where I just don’t want any more of my money going to paper companies.
So I’ve done a little audit of the paper I see in my daily life, and it comes down to these things:
- toilet paper and tissues and paper towel
- magazines and newspapers and books
- gift wrap and cards
- office paper for printing
- incoming mail and junk mail
I don’t think I’ll be able to completely rid my life of paper, and in the case of toilet paper and books I don’t particularly want to go without them! But I’ve come up with a rough plan for removing much of the need for paper in my life, and I’ll be putting it into place over the next few months.
Things I’m already doing well with:
- I already buy recycled toilet paper and paper towels
- I don’t subscribe to any newspapers, and compost the local ones I can’t avoid
- I’ve also cancelled my Yellow Pages delivery, thanks to Gavin’s information
- I use the library quite often, and donate my own books to them if I’m not going to read them again
- I reuse gift wrap, if I’m not reusing a gift bag or box
- I only send gift cards on special one-off occasions (ie not birthdays or Christmas, which happen every year)
- My printing paper at home is a big stack of barely-printed-on sheets given to me by a friend (they came from his office)
- At work, I rarely print anything myself; if I’m given handouts at a meeting, I keep them and make them into notepads for me and my friends
- I’ve switched to paperless billing for my phone bills
- I’ve got a no-junk-mail sticker on my letterbox and put my name on the Do Not Contact list (not that it stops some people!)
What I need to sort out:
- using hankies instead of tissues
- cutting back on my magazine subscriptions and finding online alternatives
- sourcing some eco-friendly (recycled, or tree-free) gift-cards for the special occasions
- printing to PDF instead of to paper
- getting more of my bills switched to email/online notifications
- talking to the other companies who send me mail to see if we can switch to email
As I go along I’ll post about these little tasks. If you’ve got any bright ideas or recommendations, I’d love to hear from you. I want this paper out of my life!
6 Comments
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I know what you mean about all the paper. I cringe every time I see someone printing off a report they could have read on their computer. I tend to not print off anything at home, scribble things on envelopes that do come through the mail!
I haven’t bought a printer cartridge in 4 years… don’t miss it either.
And even better, I have paperless classes!
With my students at Curtin University I have a class blog and they provide their reports by email!
I started with that as a trial in 2007 during a business unit at TAFE, there was so much paper involved the first semester I did it in 2006 that when I got this unit again in 2007 I started a class blog test which worked out pretty fine and all students are online nowadays.
I try to promote it and Curtin is going more online as well with using Blackboard (online) to communicate with students.
That’s fantastic, Wilma – hopefully your students will pester their other lecturers to do the same as you!
RTGL, you’d never stop cringing at my workplace – people print off giant reports just to say “Yes, that’s fine, can you just put in an extra comma here?”
Another one you might leave off your list is paper towel? We’ve manage to go without for a while now….. Not even sure why we had it in the first place! We do use greaseproof paper for wrapping sandwiches though! Need some ideas there I think as I don’t want to buy heaps of plastic containers to put everything in.
Ah, I knew as soon as I hit publish on the post that I must have forgotten something
Yep, we use paper towel, although we choose a recycled version. Mostly it sits in the back of the cupboard so we can’t get at it easily. I’ve got a bunch of Tupperware I use for lunches, because I already had it (and it’d probably last through WW3 it’s so tough!) but am looking into those cloth sandwich wraps with little velcro tabs to keep them tightly closed.