When doing some clean up in my basement the other day I decided to go through this big pile of paper that I had on my computer desk. I got amazed by the amount of publicity I found in this pile. These papers were old telephone bills and stuff like that but at least 3/4 of it all consisted of publicity flyers that companies inserted in the envelopes containing the bills.

This made me think about the amount of trees and all the ink needed to create these flyers.

An estimated 100 million trees are needed to create the 100 billion pieces of junk mail delivered to mailboxes every year. “30 percent of all mail delivered in the world is U.S. junk mail,” said Will Craven, a Forest Ethics spokesperson.

Also, it got worst when I started thinking about the amount of paper used in businesses around the world. How many times do people make a dozen copies of a document and they find out that there’s a mistake on page 2 and then print the documents all over again.

So the best way to go would be to use electronic communication whenever possible (receive your bills via email), print it out only when necessary, don’t take paper you don’t need, refuse catalogs and other “junk mail” (take yourself off their mailing lists) and use paper more than once (reload it in a printer to print on the back side, cut it up into scratch paper, write small and recycle where available).