[LINK] Environmental impact of web versus print

[Tom Worthington]

At 06:25 PM 9/22/2006, rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au wrote:
>Tom Worthington wrote:
>>Perhaps AGIMO could carry out a study on: "Are web pages better for 
>>the environment than paper documents?". ...
>
>" A report released yesterday by ABARE on Australia's forest and 
>wood products statistics shows Australians have increased their 
>consumption of paper and paper products by 25% ...

So the web has not reduced paper use and may have increased it?

In that case what steps might reverse the trend? Organizations might 
guarantee that pages would be available in the future. For example 
the UK government lets its stuff be included in the Internet archive 
<http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/webarchive/>. OJS 
has an interesting option where the whole of your electronic journal 
can be automatically backed up to archives around the world. Another 
way might be to issue DOIs, or similar for documents, to give the 
sense that they are permanent 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/qpublishing.shtml>.

Also producing documents in smaller pieces might help. For example 
providing the summary on a web page first, before the "executive 
summary" and the full report. At present it is too easy to send a 200 
page PDF document off to the printer. If you first ad to look at the 
one page abstract and then the ten page executive summary, that might 
slow you down.

ps: Another useful technique would be to buy SLOWER printers for the 
office and charge the paper cost to individual business units. I have 
a little ink jet printer which does about two pages a minute (double 
sided printing by turning the pages over yourself halfway), which 
really makes you think hard before printing.  ;-)



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml