Tip o’ the Day: Save a Tree, Read it Online
Getting your news online not only saves trees, but saves energy and pollution involved in the process of making and delivering newspapers.
Even though newspapers are seeing a decline in revenue and may be cutting back on their print runs, newsprint is still alive and kicking. According to the Green Press Initiative Americans go through 9.2 million tons of newsprint per year. Of that amount only 32% is made from recycled material, which leaves 6 million tons of new trees needed for newspapers. Only 69% of newspapers actually get recycled.
Most large newspapers have online editions, but even if you're not in a major metropolitan area, check to see if your local paper has gone virtual. Or as Shea has suggested, you can build your own personal newspaper with RSS feeds from your favorite news sources. One advantage to this is news is updated throughout the day online, so you're always getting up to date information.
If you're printing out articles to read on the go make sure to use the 'print article' feature if available. It will format the article appropriately to get more text on one page. If you just want to save an article for later either book mark the permalink or copy and paste the text (including all pertinent publishing info) into a word document and save it to your computer that way. Plus there's always the online archives if you want to refer back to the article at a later date.
But if you still can't let go of your daily subscription (my mom certainly won't) be sure to recycle.
Amy says: I'll admit, I do enjoy getting my fingers dirty and flipping through the newsprint at my neighborhood cafe. However, instead of purchasing a new one, I'll first check to see if I can snag someone else's they've already finished.
Tags: Daily Tips, Environment, Media, newspaper, online, recycling, trees
- Uncategorized
May 11th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Ever since I moved to Chicago, I have only purchased one copy of either newspaper - because my wife’s name was in it!
Another way to “capture” an article is to save it to a PDF - a wise move for all document preservation.
mp/m
May 11th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Don’t forget the other area that is contributing to the death of trees for paper through laziness.
The lumber mills are to lazy to keep each type of wood shavings separate, so they could sell the tons of wood byproduct to the paper mills to make newsprint. Instead, they mix it all up and make MDF [ Medium Density Fiberboard ]. That stuff that 90% of your “wood” furniture is made out of should have been used to make paper products with, saving the trees the paper mills cut.
May 14th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Jaqui, I see what you are saying about the wood shavings being used for paper…but they are still using it for SOMETHING (MDF). I would find it far more offensive and foolish if they were truely wasting this material. Also, do we know that these shavings CAN be used to make paper? Is the material appropriate for the process? I don’t doubt that the mills are lumping this all together because they are looking to save cost on additional sorting or shipping.