"Shrink":
A new campaign to stop the madness of paper over-consumption
Since the early 1960s, world consumption
of paper and paperboard has increased by almost seven times. Every
year, each person in the UK gets through an average of more than
200 kilogrammes of paper. In the US the figure is almost 300 kilogrammes.
Global paper consumption is massively inequitable. In Laos, for
example, people use on average less than one kilogramme of paper
a year. Yet rural communities in Laos are currently faced with
the rapid expansion of eucalyptus plantations to meet the global
paper industry's demands for raw material.
Much of the paper consumption in the
North is unnecessary. Office workers in the UK print out 120 billion
sheets of paper a year, enough to create a pile more than 13,000
kilometres high. Two-thirds of this paper ends in the bin before
the end of the day. North Americans get through 130 billion paper
cups a year. The cups are thrown away after 15 minutes of use.
This month sees the launch of the "Shrink"
campaign, which targets paper waste. "Paper production causes
a wide range of harmful environmental impacts," explains
Mandy Haggith, the co-ordinater of the Shrink campaign. "By
using less of it we can reduce our pressure on forests, cut energy
use and climate change emissions, limit water, air and other pollution
and produce less waste. There are also negative social impacts
and human rights abuses linked to paper production, particularly
in southern countries." The "Shrink" project, which
is backed by more than 50 European environmental NGOs, invites
people to pledge to cut their paper consumption on its website:
www.shrinkpaper.org.
The website suggests several ways that
people can reduce their paper consumption. "We can stop using
paper unnecessarily, like information we can easily read on screen,
or picking up paper napkins we don't need," says Haggith.
"We can find ways to use less where paper is necessary, like
printing double-sided or re-using envelopes. And we can try to
resist paper that is thrust upon us by signing off junk mail,
asking to be taken off mailing lists and databases, refusing free
news or leaflets and avoiding highly packaged goods."
The Shrink campaign also aims to persuade
corporations and institutions to reduce their paper use. "Organisations
and companies can try to understand where most paper is wasted,
for example in office systems, communication efforts or short-term
packaging, and encourage and reward staff to come up with ideas
for saving paper: changing the way people work so they make better
use of paperfree technology, finding more efficient designs for
packing goods, and so on," says Haggith.
In June 2008, the campaign wrote to
the CEOs of 20 UK-based companies: five catalogue companies; five
supermarkets; five magazine publishers; and five banks and insurance
companies. "We chose them because they represent four of
the biggest paper-using sectors and are a cross-section of those
sectors with a diversity of policies on paper," Haggith explains.
Each of these sectors is, of course,
not only responsible for wasting paper. Supermarkets undermine
farmers' livelihoods, destroy biodiversity by demanding homogenous
products, are responsible for an enormous increase in food miles,
build their massive shopping centres outside town centers leading
to increased car use and the destruction of the countryside, and
they finish off local shops by undercutting prices. Banks finance
all sorts of environmentally and socially destructive projects.
Magazines are financed through advertising, a major driver of
over-consumption. Catalogues exist only to promote ever more consumption.
But as Haggith points out, "The forests and people who suffer
the negative impacts of the paper industry can't wait for all
the other wrongs to be righted before we tackle over-consumption
of paper."
The campaign aims to support the struggles
of movements in the South against the expansion of the pulp and
paper industry there. "When we ask colleagues in the global
South what they think our priorities should be in our work with
the pulp and paper industry their answer is that we should tackle
over-consumption in rich countries and try to reduce demand for
the products of the industry," says Haggith.
Last year, Haggith travelled by train
and boat from her home in Scotland to Sumatra, Indonesia, to research
her book "Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost
of Paper". "I was horrified by how destructive our paper
footprint is," she says. "I met Indonesian villagers
fighting a land-claim with a paper company that is growing acacia
on their community land to make copy paper for sale in European
and North American markets. I asked them what I could do to help
their fight, and they told me to ask people in Europe to use less
copy paper. To show real solidarity with people struggling with
multinational extractive industries, it is not enough for us to
shift our consumption from one brand to some other, hopefully
slightly less obnoxious, brand. That only displaces the problem.
Consuming differently is not good enough, we need to consume less
AND differently."
Pledge to reduce your paper use here:
http://www.shrinkpaper.org/take-the-pledge.htm
By Chris Lang, http://chrislang.org
