Be Marginal To Be Green (this really works.)
Posted
Thursday, June 12, 2008 5:22 PM
by
jstackepaper
Change your page margins to save trees and increase carbon offsets. On NPR today, Terry Gross interviewed 4th Graders from Attrium Grade School in Watertown about their green project. These kids are quite a bit smarter than us, showing us a simple concept can go a long long way: The kids, interviewed in the Boston Globe a month ago, calculated that in the US alone, we can save 6,156,000 trees per year if we just reduced our margins when printing.
The great part is they took action with their findings by gaining agreement from the City of Watertown, Massachusetts to reduce their page margins. Shortly after, the children took their idea to cities of Cambridge and Malden as well as legislators from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Their orginal goal was taking the message out to the whole world (let's see if we can do that here!)
I had to pause a bit to think about this. This week, I went to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference held at the Westin Waterfront in Boston. It was a good, but small show and it probably only killed 30 or 40 healthy pines. But why not give out business cards with URLs? Everyone is connected, how about saving a few hundred trees by prohibiting printed brochures or printed materials? (My dog Bubba got a little stuffed monkey. That's ok, isn't it?)
If you're curious - here's my math assuming you change from 1/2 inch to 1/4 inch top, bottom, left and right hand margins. You save 6.667% of a single sheet of paper. In other words, for every fifteen pages of changed margins, you will have saved over one page. For every ream of paper, 33 pages. (75 square inches of available paper before and 80 square inches after, you've saved 5 square inches of paper.).
Here are more ideas:
1. Use alternative paper sources like rapid growing bamboo or willow.
2. Write to your city to do this with all documents.
3. Print this at the bottom of every PDF:
When printing, please consider our environment
Lastly, somehow, editors and lawyers think they need their margins. Someone needs to figure out a way to help them (in more ways than one!)
(Thanks to my friend Suzy at Polycom for this one!)
Got any others? How do we help lawyers and editors?