Green Use of Paper
I thought these facts listed in the March/April 2008 issue of Training were interesting. You can read the full article, "It's Not Easy being Green" in EBSCO Business Source Premier.
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets.
• 1 ream of paper (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree.
• The average cost of a wasted page is $0.06, and the average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day--1,410 wasted pages per year at a cost of $84 per employee.
• The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages a year.
• In 2004, the U.S. used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams)--the equivalent of 178 million trees.
• The U.S. uses enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that's 6,815 miles long. That's more than the distance from New York to Tokyo.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (the same amount of energy an average household uses in 10 months).
• Making a single sheet of copy paper can use more than 13 ounces of water--more than a typical soda can.
• Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water; 2,278 pounds of solid waste; and 5,690 pounds of green house gases (the equivalent of 6 months of car exhaust).
• It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper.
SOURCE: GREENPRINT, A SOFTWARE COMPANY DEVOTED TO ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION, http://WWW.PRINTGREENER.COM/EARTHDAY.HTML.