Jason Rosencrantz is smart
and I like him a lot. He’s the best dancer I have ever met. And a good writer with some things to say
You can make a difference!
I heard about this delightful young woman on NPR that started the above website to help keep costs low for paper. What she ultimately did was she figured out an effortless way to conserve paper.
Please change your margins! And sign the petition to get Microsoft to change their default margins entirely!
Little bits from www.ChangetheMargins.com:
The default margins for Microsoft Word are set at 1.25″ on each side. According to the good people on the Microsoft Help line, there is no technical reason for this. It’s merely a convention we have all gotten used to. Documents will print just as easily if you change the margins to .75″ on each side.
In October 2001, a research team of the Penn State Green Destiny Council released a report on the ecological analysis of Mueller Laboratory, a biology building on the Penn State University Park campus. This policy paper, derived from the report, showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.
Here are some general stats I’ve come across in my research about paper usage and the environment. I’ll soon be adding in more specific stats on just what changing the margins can do. But for now, alarm yourselves with these loverly numbers…
-In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth’s surface was covered by forests – today that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.
-It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees and 390 gallons of oil to make a ton of paper
-That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space.
-That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.
-Each one million pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.
-Each person in an office on average uses 2.5 pounds of paper each week. In the U.S., a ton = 2000 pounds, so that means every 2 years and 70 days, each person in an office on average uses a ton of paper. Now re-read the stats above and see how those numbers hit you. Suddenly, a ton doesn’t seem like such an abstract number.
-Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year — enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.
