Paper  

Paper factoids

To fill a four-drawer filing cabinet costs about £13,800 ($25,000) including the time to generate, process and deal with the paper.

It costs another £1160 $2,100 per year to maintain the filing cabinet given that is takes about 10 minutes to retrieve and re-file each piece of paper when needed

Approximately 3% of documents are misfiled, which translates into another £67 ($120) per document to retrieve them.

The typical office worker uses a fax machine, printer or copier 61 times per week

According to Hewlett Packard, email, which was supposed to reduce the amount of printed paper, resulted in a 40% increase in printing volumes

Paper consumption in the U.S. will grow to 65.6 million tonnes by 2015, and 20m tonnes in UK .

Current usage stands at 49million tonnes in US and 14million tonnes in UK .

Every year US businesses generate 1 trillion pieces of NEW paper- enough for a forest bigger in area than Maryland (50% bigger than New Hampshire ).

UK businesses produce enough new paper to need a forest every year bigger than Northern Ireland .

It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees to make a ton of paper, or one tree makes about 11,500 pages of 8.5 x 11 20-pound paper.

Each one million pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.

ENERGY to produce a tonne of paper:

1 tonne virgin paper uses 390gallons oil, 4000 kwh electricity- enough to power a 3 bed house for a year, and 7,000 gallons water   

Reducing Recycled paper use (saves 28%-70% less energy than above, 50% less water and up to 3,000 kwh power, but can have chlorine polluting effect and paper is not able to be recycled indefinitely)

8 cu feet landfill waste (that produces Methane which is 20 times more dangerous to the environment than CO2, as well as Carbon Dioxide)

To deliver mail in UK : (excluding all private carriers, couriers, bikes etc)

Royal Mail (according to their own accounts) causes 850,000 tonnes Carbon Dioxide pollutant in delivering mail in the UK .

The US is 40 times bigger in size!