http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080423/NEWS03/804230356
In light of Earth Day’s 38th anniversary Tuesday, Sanford Upper School in Delaware implemented a wholly paperless day—a fitting homage since the “holiday’s” 1970 inception. A senior at the school initiated Paperless Day, proposing the school refrain from paper usage the entire day, in an effort to encourage a “greener” society. The student estimated about 2,400 sheets of paper were saved.
This was an admirable step for the school, and surely similar green-conscious initiatives will follow, but one day a year is just not enough.
Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it? But how often does it make us act? Sure, we’ve adopted the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and we’re even doing that hip recycling thing, but not enough of us implement the ideals of environmental consciousness as lifestyle changes, rather than a temporary fix to a burgeoning environmental crisis. We exacerbate the problem of global warming, a thinning ozone layer and melting polar ice caps when we fail to act consciously.
Paul Brooks was right on the money in his 1971 observation in The Pursuit of Wilderness: “Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.” We’re not doing enough to conserve our environmental resources, and we’ll continue to pay the price.
A global society of waste can only sustain itself for so long, but old (wasteful) habits die hard…unless consequences follow. For starters, maybe businesses should face stiff financial penalties when they fail to recycle.
Well, let’s go retro and invoke the 70s vision of Earth Day—let’s protect our Earth. Too much to ask?
While we’d like to go paperless, our industry as a whole just isn’t there. For example, I’d like to get ads by e-mail, but my vendors still prefer to send faxes. And I still have to fax my orders in to them – which means I have to print them out.
We try to cut down on paper by using both sides of every sheet we use. For example, when I get a fax, I put it blank side up in my printer. Then I print my PO on the back. In this way I can cut our paper use in half. Then of course I take the used paper to the recycle center.
We also recycle and re-use all of our shipping materials that we receive. We try to give everything a second life before it moves to the dump or recycle center. Recycling also saves us money; I’ve never bought void-fill, and went 3 years before I had to buy (new) boxes to do shipping out.