A Paper-Free Lifestyle
February 12, 2008
Yesterday the New York Times published an article entitled: Pushing Paper Out the Door about Google engineer Chris Uhlik and his efforts to make his home paper-free.
This got me thinking. How convenient would the paper-free lifestyle be? I take a look at my desktop. Sheets of paper are strewn everywhere. Take away the paper products and I have JBL Creature Speakers, Sennheiser headphones, a TI-83+ Calculator, A Maxtor external hard-drive, A TV remote control, my laptop, a lamp, a small Dasani water bottle, and a bottle of multi-vitamins. Gathered together, they have a footprint of about 6 square feet. My desk itself is about 7 feet long and 3 feet deep (including my dresser which is adjacent to my desk, forming one counter) creating 21 square feet of desk space. So while my technology uses less than a third of my desk, I can hadly see any part of my desk due to the masses of paper and books that occupy it. In addition to this clutter, my shelf unit is overflowing with books, notebooks, and loose papers.
While I complain of my room being too small it occurs to me that my room is just too cluttered with papers. So how nice would my room be without paper? Well I’ll find out eventually since I will now be attempting to reduce my “Paper Footprint” (And yes I’ve just trademarked that phrase).
There is a bonus. Thanks to former Vice-President Al Gore we all know that our wasteful lives have irreparably changed the planet. As landfills overflow countries turn to burning their garbage as a means to both generate energy and deal with their trash problems. In response to activism the cliché response is, “But what can I do?”, well I’ve figured out what I can do. By reducing, and perhaps one-day eliminating, my paper-footprint I can reduce the strain we put on the planet. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Greenpeace loving environmentalist but I do understand that it is important for people to protect the planet, if only out of self-interest (more on my opinions on protecting the planet in future posts).
I pose this question to my readers, few though they may be, if you could change one thing in your life to help the planet, what would it be and why?
