Killing Our Environment Softly

By Mana Moshkforoush, Grade 8

        Take a look around the room you’re in. Notice how many things are made out of paper. There may be books, newspapers, magazines, notices, printer paper, posters, cardboard boxes. I’m not a very environmentally-obsessed person, in fact, the farthest I’ve gone to help the environment would probably be joining the "environmental club" in grade 7, and participating in the shoreline cleanup this September. But I still get frustrated about 10 times a day over paper.    

          As students, we spend most of the day (if not all) surrounded by assignments, projects, notices, homework and notes. I’ve attended school in an Asian country and an African country, I have also visited schools in Europe. What most of us don’t know is that Asian, African and some European countries all use notebooks. This means no duo-tangs, binders, folders or anything that consists of inserting or extracting paper. You might be thinking about all those printed notes you receive from teachers every single day. Well this is how it goes in Eastern Countries:

Teachers actually write on the board (no overheads or projector screens)!!! Students use a writing utensil called a pencil and copy the notes into their notebook. Shocking!!! I know! Well guess what? Not only does this exotic method get the information into the brain instead of the binder (where it stays a while before getting lost or thrown in the trash), it also saves TONS of paper!

          I am so sick and tired of paper. What would schools do if all of the sudden there wasn't any more paper? Can a teacher teach without handing out a single piece of paper? Can students learn without scribbling on paper? I don’t think so. This year and possibly next year, report cards are not going to be handed in to students because of the BC teacher’s job action. I’m not sure how many thousand students (Gr. 4-11) there are in British Columbia. All I know is that this year, a blank sheet of paper will be sent out to all students each term/semester. That is the number of thousand students (Gr. 4-11) multiplied by three. I have a simple question… Why can’t they email these BLANK SHEETS OF PAPER?! Whatever the answer is, it can’t be good enough. You want to know why? OK, because 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing paper uses 24 trees! It takes 390 gallons of oil to produce that one ton of paper!

          The situation that gets me most frustrated are the ones where we have a choice between saving and killing our planet, and we choose the second choice. An example of this is when I made a trip to Los Angeles, California in the spring break. Grocery shopping was such a pain. They did not use plastic bags; instead they used… paper bags. What made it worse? They wouldn’t use one, just to be safe, they would use two. Another example would be when my teacher once printed packages for his students. Each package consisted of 5 sheets of paper. There are about 30 students in my class. That makes a total of 150 sheets of paper. He had made a mistake while printing the sheets. He dropped the sheets of paper into the recycling bin and left the class to print them again the way he wanted them. When he came back he realized that he had made the same mistake again, which means he printed another 150 sheets of paper for no reason. When I asked him about so much paper going to waste, he merely shrugged and said “it gets recycled”. Now how many times have I heard that before!

          Well Mr. X and fellow peers, the process of recycling consists of the fiber getting shredded and mixed with water to make a pulp. The pulp is washed, refined and cleaned, then turned to slush in a beater. Each time paper is recycled, the fiber length decreases, which impacts its strength. What all this means is when paper is recycled there is only a certain amount of the fiber that can be used in the process of paper making. Conclusion, only a percent of the paper is recycled, not all of it. DO NOT use recycling as an excuse!

          We are hurting our environment:

* In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth's surface was covered by forests - today    that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.

* To produce one trillion pages of paper takes 8.5 million acres of trees, representing an area larger than the country of Belgium or the state of Maryland.
* Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year, enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.

*  Almost 4 billion trees are cut down each year for paper use.

*  The world uses 400 percent more paper now than it did 40 years ago.

*  The United States is only 5 percent of the world's population, but uses 30 percent of the world's paper.

*  Used paper and paper products make up the largest portion of our trash - about 40 percent!

* Every Sunday, 500,000 trees could be saved if everyone recycled their newspapers.

"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our
land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt