Green Magnet

You might have read a very popular sentence under some email saying "17 Trees Get Cut For A Ton Of Paper".

With technologies in Paper Industry advancing further, in 2010, it's still expected to consume some 12 trees for a ton of paper of a quality required in offices. There are some people crying for issues like global warming, climate change, etc & then printing & distributing handbills for it. They don't understand that they are actually supporting the global warming & climate change by making some more trees to cut because of handbill printing!

The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector's carbon emissions.

Paper accounts for 25% of landfill waste.

Paper accounts for 1/3rd of municipal landfill waste. Municipal landfills account for 1/3rd of human-related methane emissions (& methane is 23-times more potent a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide).

Here is what we can do... Recycle EVERY paper!

You may say we do recycle the newspapers.

But wait... You can do more...

Movie/Railway/Bus tickets, receipts, forms, old calendars, paper bags, books, notebooks, booklets, handbills, brochures & other promotional/informative papers, paper stickers/labels, covers, Chocolate/soap/other wrappers, tissue, drawing paper, paper used for decorative purposes, junk mail, cardboard boxes, photocopied(yes, including your exam cheats!)/printed papers, absolutely any small or big paper, which is no more useful to you can be recycled. Keep a carry bag for this purpose, in which you can get together all your small paper things like tickets, receipts, wrappers, etc for a month. Hand this bag to the person who collects the paper scrap from you every month along with the newspapers.

(Note: For the sake of our dear planet, kindly ignore, if that person or some other relative/friend present there, looks at you with a look that says "Idiot!" :P)

Some people say there are some private/confidential papers which can not be recycled. But most of the companies keep a machine that eats such confidential papers & takes out its converted version of complete trash, which can eventually be recycled. Personal things which can not be trashed with machines (like ATM receipts) can be recycled after tearing them down into 8-10 pieces.

1. Main benefit is saving the trees that could have cut because of extra papers produced from non-recycled materials. Saved forests not only balance the environment by absorbing the pollution emitted, but also make the life in forests area sustainable for living creatures inside & around it.

2. A side-benefit to this is you save the polluting fuel* that would have gone in the whole paper making process right from cutting the trees to making a paper.

3. Another (very small) benefit is the Money you get from recycling. Of course, validity of this benefit depends upon your economical state & attitude towards money! :)

4. Another small benefit is that, normally waste collected by municipal/local authorities is not treated to get it recycled. It's normally burnt & so this paper scrapped by you burns & pollutes our climate to a little more extent. You can obviously avoid it by recycling the paper!

*Fuel used in any form is normally a polluting fuel, whether directly or indirectly. Electricity may have been used for the purpose, right? Ya, right. But again, generating this electricity itself is a polluting activity.