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Printer-Friendly ModeExcessive paper waste threatens environment
February 12, 2007 —
Wait - don't throw away this newspaper!
The average American uses a little less than 700 pounds of paper a year, according to the Paper Industry Association Council, with roughly half of the paper recovered and recycled. That means that we are still throwing away around 350 pounds of paper per person per year. Using standard 20-pound paper, this comes to an average of 35,000 sheets a year per person that ends up in landfills.
We are throwing our forests away sheet by sheet of paper - roughly 35 percent of landfill space is filled with recyclable paper.
This campus isn't exactly designed for the environmentally conscious. Do you know where the nearest recycling bin is on campus? If you said outside of Java City, hotbed of commuter traffic and home to hundreds of discarded New York Times, you would be wrong.
Outside of the computer labs, recycling is really not an option throughout this campus. There are more opportunities over in the education building, but the majority of campus never walks its corridors.
Cost is the single largest barrier to an adequate recycling program on campus: we like our tuition cheaper than anyone else in the state. However, this is the sort of short-term thinking that gets humanity into trouble. If we continue to pass the buck on issues large and small, we will reap the ecological damage in upcoming years.Using freely available information on the Internet, I crunched the numbers to show just how much paper our campus of roughly 9,500 throws away in a year. Let's assume that the average student will recycle 10 pounds worth of class notes, discarded Vanguards, and computer printouts. This turns out to be 95,000 pounds of paper, or 47.5 tons that students will throw away.
Recycling one ton of paper saves roughly 17 trees, so the campus recycling program would save more than 800 trees each year.
There are other benefits as well. On average, recycling one ton of paper means one less ton of paper is going to the landfills, at an average savings of $15-$30 per ton. Also, the paper that SVSU recycles can be sold. The University could use that money to reinvest into the purchase of new paper.
This is no panacea, for many will continue to throw their papers away rather than recycle them, even if they walked directly into a recycling bin. And granted, recycling the paper will cost more money than if the University simply decided to keep chucking out students' paper. But the University already participates in a recycling program for its employees, and I can personally attest to the mounds of paper recycled by this program. How can the University defend its policy of providing opportunities for their employees to recycle, yet somehow screw the pooch when it comes to the students?
I call on anyone who will listen to do something. Student Association, you now have the ability to make a long-lasting improvement to our campus by advocating the administration. Do the campus a favor and take substantive action that students will see, rather than play with our tuition dollars - the money you are allowed to allocate - as if it were Monopoly money.
As for the administration? I'd certainly be willing to pay a nominal recycling fee on campus. For those who wouldn't, I hope you enjoy your extra few dollars living in a treeless landscape surrounded by mountains of garbage.