When I was a child my mother managed a bookstore, needless to say our house was (and continues to be) full of books. As I grew up I felt the need to build my own personal library with books that I love; however, now when I look at the piles of books that I have purchased over the years I can't help but feel guilty. All of my books (which cost a fortune to move everytime I relocate myself) now represent the millions of trees that are cut down to make books, magazines, and newspapers.
Most books are made from virgin (non-recycled) paper and most magazines are made from coated virgin magazine paper. When you think about the numbers things begin to seem a little bit clearer:
- 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees
- 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
- 1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)
- 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets. (info from conserveatree)
With these numbers I began thinking about the school that I currently work at and how on average we go through about 2 reams of paper per day. Two reams of paper per day means 10 reams of paper per week, which means 520 reams of paper per year. 520 reams of paper is roughly 31 trees per year! 31 trees and that is only for copy paper, the number would continue to climb if I added in tissue, paper towel, toilet paper, and all of the arts and craft supplies. 31 trees, and this only a small school of around 70 children, I can only imagine what a large school would go through!
So with all of this in mind I have decided to limit my purchases of new books and try to borrow as many as possible from friends and my local library (which is a little difficuly as I live in Korea and the English section is quite small). If I cannot borrow a specific book that I am looking for I then make my way to a used bookstore, where I don't feel quite as guilty making a purchase. And I have been thinking more and more about buying an e-reader something like the 'nook' which can store up to 1,500 books. There are also options that you can look at to help reduce your impact on the earth when it comes to purchasing books. Companies like Eco-Libris are trying to balance out books by planting trees and supporting green books. All you have to do is visit the website buy some stickers to put on your books and for each sticker you purchase they will plant a tree.
All in all I just thought that I should share my new mantra when it comes to books: Borrow don't Buy.
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