[LINK] Environmental impact of web versus print

[Richard Chirgwin]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> 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.
A browser that could parse Web pages correctly as A4 (or US  Letter) 
page size would also be very nice, so that if I only want to print the 
stuff at the top (and not 50 pages of comment) I can do so!

RC
>
> 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