Printing and the Enviroment

Roosevelt's Green Printing Initiative is part of our effort to reduce our institutional environmental impact. Here are some facts that might help place this effort into context.

• In 2009, Roosevelt users printed nearly four million pages in the public labs and classrooms alone. That's the equivalent of a stack of paper 1,273 feet tall, which is just 170 feet shorter than the Sears Tower.

• A single 1 gigabyte USB drive is capable of storing approximately 91,000 pages of typical text-based documents (for example, Word or Excel files). At 10 cents per page it would cost approximately $9,100 to print these documents.

• The cost to store one page of a text-based document on a 1 GB USB drive costing $10 is $0.00011, or 11 thousandths of a cent.

• Hazardous chemicals released into the environment by the paper manufacturing process can include chlorine, chloroform, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and dioxins. [Environmental Defense Fund]

• Paper products occupy over 33% by weight of the total contents of American landfills (2007 data), nearly three times as much as the next closest category, food scraps. [Environmental Protection Agency]

• 80% of all discarded paper ends up in landfills. The decomposition of this paper produces methane, a greenhouse gas with 21 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide. [Environmental Paper Network]

• Replacing virgin with recycled content paper reduces energy consumption by 27%, waste water by 33%, air particulate emissions by 28%, solid waste by 54%, and, of course, wood use by 100%. [Print Net]

• The USA consumes one-fourth of the world's supply of paper and paperboard (88.6 million metric tons in 2005). [Earthtrends Research Institute]

• Traditional petroleum-based printer toners can emit hazaradous volatile organic compounds including ethylbenzene, xylenes, and styrenes. Using a soy-based toner reduces these risks. [California Department of General Services]