Low Impact

This article is the first in an irregularly published series of reducing our consumption in different areas of our life. Reducing how much we consume can have a profound impact on our environmental impact - studies show that the majority of carbon emissions we’re responsible for are produced in manufacturing the goods that we buy, rather than the electricity we use directly at home.

Paper is one item that most households consume in large quantities. It’s in our newspapers, our junk mail, our computer printouts, our kitchen towels, our books, our magazines… the list seems endless. In the best possible case, the paper comes from recycled material but has still required large amounts of water and processing. In the worst case, that paper was sourced by felling old-growth forests…and then required large amounts of water and processing!

Listed below is a number of things we can do to reduce our use of paper products around the home. Some are straightforward and obvious, while others require some changes to habits that we’ve come to take for granted. Either way, they’ll all help to reduce your paper usage, and maybe even save some money!

Reducing Junk Mail
If you live in the city, chances are that you get bombarded with a letterbox full of “unmissable retail offers”, and “once in a lifetime” fashion sales. Trust me - those “unmissable” bargains aren’t actually that unmissable!

A “No Junk Mail” sticker on your letterbox works wonders on reducing the never-ending stream of pamphlets and brochures. Even if you only receive one brochure a day (our household used to get at least 4 or 5!), a “No Junk Mail” sticker on your letterbox will still save 360 brochures a year - imagine if everyone on your block did the same!

Saving paper from your printer
Its surprising how much people print at home now. With printers getting ever cheaper, faster and more powerful, its so easy to print out web pages, essay drafts, photos, recipes and more. But not only is it wasting paper, its also burning through those surprisingly expensive ink cartridges!

One thing we can do here is change our habits. For many of us, its second nature to work off a paper copy. So, we print out our essay draft to review it or we print off a copy of a webpage for later reference.

It takes some will-power, but working off the screen not only saves paper, but has its advantages (ever corrected an essay draft on paper, but missed the edit when doing the changes on the computer?). And when it comes to printing out an interesting web page, why not just bookmark it? That way you get any updates when you check it again. Or, if you’re worried the webpage will disappear, save a copy. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox allow you to save not only the page, but also all the associated images too.

(You might want to sign up to Green Energy too, to alleviate the environmental impact of all that computer use!)

But if you really need to print something out, most printer software allows you to print multiple “pages” to a single piece of paper - the computer will shrink the page down, and print 2, 4 or more on a single sheet of paper - this alone can halve or quarter your printer paper use.

Reducing paper from magazines and newspapers
Computers are the source of a lot of paper wastage - the prediction of the paperless office was way off! But they can help reduce our household paper consumption when it comes to newspapers and magazines.

By reading the news on the web, you can quickly search out just those articles that interest you. What’s more, you get the latest news straight to your eyeballs - not just the news that made it by the midnight cut-off at the newspaper’s printing press.

The not-so-humble laptop can also help with magazines. A lot of magazines now run companion websites with similar content - just updated more frequently. You still might pay a subscription fee, but rather than a magazine being printed (and eventually thrown out), you get a password to access their website.

The venerable Scientific American is a good example. For a fair bit less than a normal subscription, you can subscribe to their digital edition, SciAm Digital. Not only does this let you download the current issue as a PDF file from their website, it allows you to download any edition from their archives.

Reducing paper use in the kitchen
Growing up, we hardly ever used paper towel. But somewhere, over the last 10-20 years, the paper towel has grown in popularity as the only solution to wipe out dishes and clean spills. If the TV ads are to be believed, entire teams of ex-NASA scientists are working tirelessly as we speak to work out the optimal battern of ruffles and bumps to get the best moisture absorption!

Rather than keep buying up on roll after roll of paper towel, the humble dishcloth is a great alternative. It lasts multiple uses (rather than just 1!), and can be washed as needed.

And if you line bins or drawers with paper towel, old newspaper can be a suitable alternative. Newspaper is also a good substitute for paper towel when cleaning windows or mirrors. I’ve heard some people say that with the new inks used in newspapers, you need to put in a bit more work to deal with some minor smearing, but I’ve never noticed any problems personally.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. They’re not rocket science, but you might be surprised with how much less paper products you end up throwing in the bin.

If you have any favourite paper-saving tricks, we’d love to hear them. Let us know in the comments!

Categories: environment, green, reduce

Tags: paper, reduce