Living in a developed country provides you an opportunity to feel standing tall as others look at you with keen interest for emulating your feat. That gives a pride feeling to the core issue of development from the living perspective and comforts being enjoyed by the community. Being a regular visitor to the country sometimes I dwell upon an idea which is construed as a biased opinion in the eyes of my native land but my current post may give a smile or two to my countrymen for analysing and making out a case of lack in determination for pursuing a humanitarian cause by the developed countries. Yes I am talking about the issue of forest conservation or ecological balance which concerns every human being on this earth. My observation is in no way any endorsement to the gross violation of forest conservation guidelines by the under developed/developing countries.
A tonne of paper consumes approximately 20 full-grown trees, over 90,000 litres of water, over 1.2 tonnes of coal and an assortment of chemicals. The greenhouse gas emissions of this tonne of paper are approximately 8 tonnes (with a tonne of recycled paper emitting approximately 2 tonnes of greenhouse gases), according to the Federal Government’s Green Office Guide (PDF).
Every year, every Australian office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of A4 paper, with approximately 50 per cent of this going straight to landfill.
I have seen flawless working in all the offices here in Sydney where most of the registrations/payments/licences is done without insisting for any paper or personal appearance. Great achievements when compared to the upcoming nations where the hard copies of documents are still persisted resulting in bulky files of the case before being disposed off with unbelievable delays. But while living in a suburb of the Sydney city, I find a large number of advertisement news papers and publicity material lying unattended strewn outside the houses, sometimes locked for days all together.
Every day, about 300,000 trees are flushed down the drain or end up as garbage all over the world.
Most tissue products available in shops today – like toilet paper, kitchen towels, tissues and napkins – are made of virgin fibres and not recycled content.
Switching to electronic bills, collectively, could save 150 million pounds of paper.
My point of contention lies in the fact whether
we can do away with toilet papers/kitchen towel and other napkin in a phased manner by finding out the alternatives\
Why cant we stop gross misuse of paper used in voluminous advertisement newspapers/ periodicals more importantly the quantity which is going unattended outside the houses. The printing cost/the distribution cost and other variable costs can be done away by weekly fairs or some other activities supplemented with personal mailer