Monday, May 11, 2009

Use of paper in USA

This is my second trip to USA. One thing which totally caught my attention and also surprised to me a huge extent was the use of paper in this country.

If the students taking this class get a chance to visit the east side of the world they will notice some systems in society is way more efficient than the system in this country which is so intensive.

Use of (paper napkins in the bath rooms for drying hands)/or even a dryer can easily be replaced by each guy carrying a handkerchief. It might sound funny to you guys, but you go to India, every hygienic conscious person carries one. Besides, use of paper in restrooms can easily be replaced by use of water. I wont go into more details, All I can say is there is wastage of paper everywhere in this country. paper industry is not only intensive energy wise, but you do not know how many trees are brought down to meet the paper supply of this paper intensive country.

2 comments:

Alex Quintana said...

I completely agree. I have never considered the issues in the bathroom, but they are valid points.

I have noticed that there has been a huge waste of paper in advertising. For example, everyone gets coupon packets, or magazines, or just advertising pieces of paper in the mail. Most people (including myself) immediately throw them away. The energy and destruction to the environment that must go into producing these annoying advertisements must be immense.

There has to be a national change to advertising without paper. If some more effective technology, such as TV or radio, can be produced or used, then the environment would be much better off. The hard part is convincing the people of this country that it is in fact better.

Minhao Dai said...

I would also agree. Another issue with paper use is the printings works. This semester has only reached the 6th week, but I have received around 500 pages of different printing from my classes. And most on them are the reference articles that are posted in blackboard. I understand this is the land of plenty, but sometime I just figured some of the printing can be saved.

There are various practical ways to reduce the waste of paper. First, we could print on both sides of the paper, in that way, we can print the same amount of things in the same amount of ink, but in half amount of papers. Another way is to save papers is to recycle them properly. Use the trash paper for scratch and other purposes could help use the paper more efficiently.