I'm a murderer

[shwaip]

...a tree murderer. I killed sooo many trees the past two days at work. We had three grants going out, a total of about 400 pages. Not bad if you need a copy or two...but I had to make 26 (as in twenty-six) copies. Over 10k pages of paper. The sad thing is that I'm sure all the pages aren't even going to be read, just tossed in the circular file.

What ever happened to the paperless office? I'm sure if I had delivered an electronic copy, it would have just gotten printed out 26 times.

[checkmate]

Tree killer!http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:xbFPj_xOlDsJ:www.greenpeace.org/raw/image_full/usa/photosvideos/photos/greenpeace-activists-and-local-2.jpg

[CB]

The students here kill lots of trees. It's very sad.

Each day about a ream or so of paper is mistakenly printed to my room from other classrooms, cause the students can't figure out that they need to set the printer for the room they're in. They must get pretty frustrated, cause it's usually about 50 copies of the same paper at a time...

It's made worse because our network is set up in such a way that you cannot cancel the jobs from the printing side (unless you stand at the printer and cancel one page at a time) and you can't trace the print-job back to it's source... All I can do it just let it print, and watch about 500 pages per night get thrown away.

[Buddy J]

Buddy Jesus says recycle. :thumbsup:

[profdlp]

...All I can do it just let it print, and watch about 500 pages per night get thrown away.
Buddy Jesus says recycle. :thumbsup:
Tell them that until they can figure out which printer to use, all the wasted paper will be used to replace toilet paper in the student bathrooms. :mullet:

[muddocktor]

Or better yet, in the faculty bathrooms. That will give the teachers some incentive to make their students do it right. :ninja:

[checkmate]

:scratch:

[shwaip]

My personal favorite is where there's some random error in the program or printer that makes it print a couple characters on the top of each page until the printer runs out of paper. If you put more in, it continues indefinitely. The only way to fix it is cycling power. At least that paper tends to get re-used.

[CB]

It's unfortunately against administrative policy to recycle... I keep badgering them about it, but they keep telling me that we can't.

[shwaip]

Are you allowed to re-use paper? Just print on the other side of the junk paper - it's what they do here, since they stopped recycling.

[CB]

Yea, I do that sometimes when I can tell that it's going to be a heavy night, and my students don't have anything that they need to print.

[TheSmJ]

The trees used for paper are grown in tree farms to be USED for paper. It's been hundreds of years since a "virgin forest" has been used to make wood based products, and thanks to lots of laws forbidding it, it won't happen again (at least in the next couple hundred years).

There are more trees in America today than there were in 1930. This country is very far from running out of trees, and the number of new, "permanent" trees are growing more and more in our country every day.


Furthermore, recycling paper actually uses more natural resources and creates MUCH more pollution than making fresh paper from trees grown in tree farms, and the paper derived from recycled paper is terrible in comparison to "new" paper anyways.

Paper and plastic recycling is actually a HUGE tax draw and creates absolutely no return to either the environment or the pocketbook. The ONLY material worth recycling (as in, uses less overall energy to renew than fresh material, creates less pollution to renew than is created when purifying fresh material, can be renewed to a quality equal to that of fresh material, AND costs less for manufacturers to use) is aluminum cans.

[shwaip]

The trees used for paper are grown in tree farms to be USED for paper. It's been hundreds of years since a "virgin forest" has been used to make wood based products, and thanks to lots of laws forbidding it, it won't happen again (at least in the next couple hundred years).

There are more trees in America today than there were in 1930. This country is very far from running out of trees, and the number of new, "permanent" trees are growing more and more in our country every day.


Does that mean that the trees still didn't die for no reason? If the paper is just being wasted, perhaps we should look to stop the waste rather than writing it off as "It's OK, we still have a lot more where that came from". Is the paper still going to take up space in a landfill or generate CO2 if it's burned, regardless of the number of trees we have to replace the one that got turned into paper?


Paper and plastic recycling is actually a HUGE tax draw and creates absolutely no return to either the environment or the pocketbook. The ONLY material worth recycling (as in, uses less overall energy to renew than fresh material, creates less pollution to renew than is created when purifying fresh material, can be renewed to a quality equal to that of fresh material, AND costs less for manufacturers to use) is aluminum cans.

There is more to "cost" than simple money. Plastic pretty much never biodegrades. If we throw that in a landfill, it will be there forever. If we burn it, it may generate toxic chemicals (some stuff does, IIRC). Just because something is cheaper doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the more environmentally conscious thing. Also, the price of "new" plastic may go up as the oil price goes up, as plastic is petroleum based.

I'm not a recycling/eco nut by any means, I'm just urging conservation. Sure, we've got a lot of trees - does that mean that we should use all the paper we can? Maybe we could turn those "tree-farms" into food farms and send the food to starving countries (not gonna happen, already an excess of food in the US anyways). We've got cheap petroleum (compared to other countries) - should we all drive huge-ass SUVs to and from work?

[RWB]

I feel bad about my own job. We use those paper mats for vehicles to keep the vehicles carpets from getting oil on them from the technicians shoes and crap. One per vehicle, but RV's get like 50 or something. We just throw them away... at least with the RV's I try to reuse the papers when I can, but the rest get wet and nasty and I am not even supposed to really reuse any of them becuase the owner(read "Monument Chevrolet of Houston") is a COMPLETE asshat.

I hate to sound like a treehugging hippy, which I am by far not, but damn..... even I know when it's just being wasteful. :(

[Nomad]

Recycled paper, I'm sorry to say, is total crap. Every piece I've gotten, lined or blank white, looks blotchy, slightly tanned, and feels more like cardboard than paper. That's not to say that we shouldn't recycle, etc., but they seriously need to find a way to make things like that better.

[TheSmJ]

There is more to "cost" than simple money. Plastic pretty much never biodegrades. If we throw that in a landfill, it will be there forever. If we burn it, it may generate toxic chemicals (some stuff does, IIRC). Just because something is cheaper doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the more environmentally conscious thing. Also, the price of "new" plastic may go up as the oil price goes up, as plastic is petroleum based.

I'm not a recycling/eco nut by any means, I'm just urging conservation. Sure, we've got a lot of trees - does that mean that we should use all the paper we can? Maybe we could turn those "tree-farms" into food farms and send the food to starving countries (not gonna happen, already an excess of food in the US anyways). We've got cheap petroleum (compared to other countries) - should we all drive huge-ass SUVs to and from work?

Garbage dumps these days are lined with a couple feet of clay on the bottom. Once they're full, they're topped off with another few feet of clay, and then covered with topsoil. From this point on, they're either turned into a park, golf course, planted with trees for a new forest (there was an old dump from the 50's right across from my house was a pine forest until the city decided to turn it into a golf course), AND while doing this, they mine the methane created to be used for natural gas.

Therefore, old dumps are actually turned into NEW wilderness once they're full, be it a park, golf course, or even a nature preserve (like the one closed to where I used to live in New York).


P.S.

Did you know that an area of 35 miles by 35 miles could hold all of the country's garbage produced for the next thousand years?

[shwaip]

Garbage dumps these days are lined with a couple feet of clay on the bottom. Once they're full, they're topped off with another few feet of clay, and then covered with topsoil. From this point on, they're either turned into a park, golf course, planted with trees for a new forest (there was an old dump from the 50's right across from my house was a pine forest until the city decided to turn it into a golf course), AND while doing this, they mine the methane created to be used for natural gas.

Therefore, old dumps are actually turned into NEW wilderness once they're full, be it a park, golf course, or even a nature preserve (like the one closed to where I used to live in New York).


Only some landfills use the methane - others just burn it.
I don't think that it's fair to the future to bury our garbage. Sure, we can bury our garbage and forget about it, but someone, sometime will have to deal with it.


P.S.

Did you know that an area of 35 miles by 35 miles could hold all of the country's garbage produced for the next thousand years?

2 things:

It's customary to provide sources for claims that are not generally known as facts.
You forgot a critical dimension: How deep? You can fit zero garbage into an area of 35x35 miles.

Also, that may work fine for the united states - we have a low population density, and it's not that hard to find a secluded enough area for a landfill. What about those countries with very high population densities? Japan has very strict recycling procedures because they have a high pop. density, and they have to export garbage.

I'm kind of curious as to what your exact position is on this issue. It almost seems like you're saying that we shouldn't worry about it because it's not going to be a problem in our lifetime.

[profdlp]

...Sure, we can bury our garbage and forget about it, but someone, sometime will have to deal with it...

...It almost seems like you're saying that we shouldn't worry about it because it's not going to be a problem in our lifetime.
I think the tricky thing in any era is to not drag ones feet on matters which need to be addressed immediately, while not expending resources on problems which simply cannot be solved right at the moment.

When it becomes economically and technologically feasible to recycle a product I can guarantee you it will be done. That's not to say that being wasteful in any area of our lives is a good idea. Someday some fine chap will invent a way to turn old landfills into valuable commodities, at which point people will be bidding on who gets the job.

[shwaip]

I agree, recycling some things is not feasible. I don't have a problem if a few things that can be recycled get thrown in the garbage or if things that are possible to recycle, but just aren't reasonable aren't recycled. However, at school I see paper wasted (as described above), garbage cans full of recyclables, and things like that. The only excuse is sheer laziness when there's a recycling bin withing sight.

I think the tricky thing in any era is to not drag ones feet on matters which need to be addressed immediately, while not expending resources on problems which simply cannot be solved right at the moment.

When it becomes economically and technologically feasible to recycle a product I can guarantee you it will be done. That's not to say that being wasteful in any area of our lives is a good idea. Someday some fine chap will invent a way to turn old landfills into valuable commodities, at which point people will be bidding on who gets the job.

But part of the problem with the idea that someday something will come along that's a miracle cure to the future problem is what can cause the immediate problems. Ounce of prevention/pound of cure stuff. Peak Oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_crisis#Peak_oil) may be a good example. Whether or not the theory holds - I'm no expert, it provides a good parallel. For so long, and even today, oil is treated as if there is no end in sight. The US represents 60% of the oil demands (from the same wiki article). People are looking at alternative energy sources, but they're too expensive. At some point, either oil prices will rise high enough, or alternative energy will get cheaper. If our oil is cut of unexpectedly - either from a shortage or by some collusion of oil producing countries, we will be faced with an immediate problem that could have been made less severe and delayed by some work on alternative energy sources. Once again, it's clearly not feasible to go to only solar/wind/other power, but a little work now may make the future immediate problems less of a problem