Why can’t college papers go green?
Written by: Ryan Martin
The simplest solutions seem to be the ones that no one, at least that I have seen, has been able to try. Even people that I know on the other side of the country have to print out papers to turn in, and in this day and age, it is not infeasible to mandate that all things turned in must be done so electronically.
Mandate is the operative word, for even with the option, the option is still open for students to use paper that, most likely, will be used for that academic paper only, and discarded afterwards. Even if the paper is recycled, the energy and process of recycling takes some toll on the environment. Not to mention, that halting the process of increasing paper-demand will have a tremendous impact.
It really is sad to think about and even more sad to see the waste and one time use of paper. I can understand the use of paper to print dissertations and books, but for the trivial uses that really aren’t going to go anywhere but to a plastic bin…Why?
Well, there is an evil con to any idea, and of course this would entail the increased use of electricity and electronic components, and therefore possibly causing the prices of kilowatt hours to go up (yes, slippery slope argument, but let’s consider it), but there is an infinite amount of potential electricity on this planet, though some ways of producing them are not the greatest; the time it takes to replant trees (if that does get accomplished), is far too long. Not to mention the possible sources that are used for paper: rainforests, national parks, homes for animals in general.
I mean, even going from that fact alone, there is, with every tree taken down, another source of potential phytochemical that could be used to research disease treatments. The amount of plant species in the rainforest alone is mind-boggling, and when taken into consideration the amount of chemical that makes up each; there is enough research there to provide even more jobs than one could think possible!
Professors like to say that it is inconvenient for them to comment on papers that are turned in via e-mail, but I can say this: has the environment been inconvenient to us?
