Reduce paper consumption

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The EEPN has a long-running project called Shrink Paper, in which we bring together practical tools and examples of paper efficiency and reducing paper consumption.

Why use less paper?

Using less paper can make the world a fairer place. By using as much as six times the world average, most Europeans and North Americans are using far more than our fair share of the Earth’s resources.

Paper is a precious part of our life, with many life-enhancing uses like books and passports. It can be a sustainable product, but only it if comes from responsible sources and is used efficiently and not wastefully. As paper production is resource intensive, becoming more efficient in our paper use can cut energy use and climate change emissions, limit water, air and other pollution and produce less waste. Furthermore, deforestation has heavy social impacts and is often related to human rights abuses, particularly in countries in the global South. Responsible and efficient use of paper helps curb deforestation and support responsible paper production. Ultimately we all should value paper more highly as a precious resource and not use it as a disposable commodity.

Using less paper can also save you money

The indirect savings can be 10 times the cost of the paper alone. These include reducing the costs of technology like photocopy toner and printer ink, paying for less storage space and filing equipment, slashing postage costs and saving time. Paper is a valuable natural resource and using it carefully will make you feel better than being wasteful. We are not advocating the use of alternative materials to paper, unless they are proven to have a smaller ecological footprint, and we encourage all paper users to work towards all the goals in our global paper vision.

Not only paper, use less of everything!

The EEPN’s focus is on paper, however it is clear that overconsumption and inefficient consumption as well as bad practices also occur with other commodities. In the last 50 years, humanity doubled demands on natural resources, increased our carbon footprint 11-fold and quadrupled our paper consumption. By 2007 our footprint exceeded the Earth´s biocapacity by 50%.

By 2030 we would need 2 planets to keep up with current rates of resource consumption (including carbon absorption capacity), but we only have one planet!

Food, fibre and fuel compete intensively for limited land and water resources, which raises fundamental questions about how we can adapt our ways of living and doing business. Yet many of us can see that we need to find an alternative to business as usual.  In 2010,  according to Price Waterhouse Cooper, 34% of Asia-Pacific Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and 53% of Latin American CEOs expressed concern about the impacts of biodiversity loss on their business growth prospects, yet so far only 18% of Western European CEOs get the message.

In the longer term, as population and incomes grow,  humanity will require forestry and farming practices that produce more with less land, water and pollution, and we will require new consumption patterns that meet the needs of the poor while eliminating waste and over-consumption by the affluent. We want to see paper producers and consumers leading the way in this change. For more information on how to reduce your paper consumption, visit shrinkpaper.org and if you are interested in supporting our work on this topic, please get in touch.