Krishnan's weblog – an assortment of things. A scribble pad. A hybrid microblog. Mostly bread crumbs of an internet journey.
We start off by doing a small calculation from a reputed text book. The text book is Shreve’s Chemical Process Industries, which is a textbook adopted in the chemical engineering curriculum of many reputed colleges.
An A4 size office paper of normal quality weighs 5 grams. It is easy for one to pro-rate the above table and estimate what it takes to make 5 grams of paper.
Based on 1982 data, to make an A4 paper you would need:
Well, the story does not stop here. I know that the paper industry has adopted better manufacturing methods and today the specific consumption for making paper could be a little different. Today’s processes use significant amounts of recycle paper, use lesser water. Again, the amount of paper recycled and water conserved in different plants /countries is different, so it becomes difficult to establish an exact global average in a brief article.
Nevertheless, a few parallels can be drawn.
Every time you waste an A4 paper at office, conservatively, I can assume that, you also waste a large cup of water, a spoon full of coal (or oil), another spoonful of various chemicals, energy sufficient to keep a 40 W bulb glowing for 10 minutes and wood whose weight could be 2-4 times the weight of the paper, depending on the amount of recycle paper used.
Every time you throw a piece of paper into a dust bin, imagine yourself wasting all the other resources as well. I’m sure you’ll find it a lot easier to save paper.
Learning Daily is a personal blog that is just as random as my thoughts. The navigation bar at the top and the search box may be the only things that will help you find something.
My present interests lie in sustainability, peak oil, debian, Web after 2.0, creativity and epistemology. I learn daily. I learn about everything under the sun and even those beyond it. I am a perpetual student whose believes that wisdom is the real reward for learning.