Plan.Paperless

With the coming of fall, I’ve noticed the beautiful tress in my community looking even more spectacular than usual. Looking at the amazing colours and the stature of these magnificent trees just reminds of how blessed we are to have trees in general. 

It’s caused me to think about how many notebooks and books I’ve wasted in my past years as a student. I remember as a child begging my mother to buy me these adorable notebooks that I just ‘had’ to have. I would take these notebooks home, write something in maybe two pages, then it would lay forgotten on my bookshelf and eventually thrown out when I was told to clean my room.

Even in recent years, as I matured when it came to spending money, I was still finding that I bought 5 notebooks per semester, and although I used them, there was still at least one third of wasted paper in the background. I would buy an extra three rough work notebooks as well per year. I barely ever finished these notebooks.

Over the past two years of my university life these notebooks have added up. I’ve calculated that in my first and second years of university alone I’ve used 20 notebooks with 200 pages for my ‘good copy’ lecture notes, 30 notebooks with 80 pages for my rough lecture notes and 10 notebooks with 250 pages for rough work for assignments. I calculated that if I roughly use ⅔ of each notebook on average, that means that I’ve wasted approximately 2967 pages in 2 years of university. This is not even included scrap paper I’ve used when I didn’t have a notebook, notebooks I used outside of school, PDF’s that I’ve printed that I could’ve just annotated on my iPad.

Let’s expand on this. There are approximately 30,000 students at my university. Let’s assume that on average they’ve all used at least 2,750, if we were to base this on me. This means that over the course of 2 years 82,500,000 sheets of paper have been wasted. This is roughly equivalent to an astonishing 5,200 trees! This is just one university among thousands in the world. The more that we think about this, the more mind-blowing the number becomes.

Since I am studying mathematics and statistics, I recently analyzed a poll that I ran on my Instagram where I asked my followers a few questions. The results were quite interesting. 

First of all, I learned that almost 60% of followers never look at more than half of their bullet journal pages after creating them. If we assume that each of these people own a Leuchtterm 1917 which has 239 pages, this means that each person has roughly 120 pages in their Leuchtterm that are just sitting there. 

Furthermore, approximately 35% of my followers say that they do not try to conserve paper while bullet journaling.

Finally, when I asked my followers how much paper in their workplace or studies could be replaced, over 65% of them said more than half could be replaced.

Now of course this wasn’t a comprehensive survey, I would need to take many more data points to be certain of my results, but I strongly believe it is a good indicator of what is going on in the bullet journal community when it comes to wasting paper.

Why do we care about all of these wasted pages? Does it matter how much paper we use? I was interested to know my effect on cutting down trees so I did some research. In the past two years, I’ve been responsible for cutting down 1 tree. If I were to approximate this over my lifetime as a student, this means that I have used up the paper created from 14 trees. (source: click here) There are a lot of discrepancies, but there are many statements stating that one mature tree can on average provide oxygen for a family of 4. So from 14 trees that means that there is less oxygen for 56 people (Source: click here). Now we know why our teachers in elementary school were always telling us to recycle!

Additionally, almost 15% of the world’s population depends on forests as a means for food, water, clothing, traditional medicine and shelter. Besides this, forests are a way of consuming carbon dioxide that builds up in the atmosphere as well. The World Wildlife Fund states that deforestation causes approximately 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. They also say that due to deforestation the number of square miles of forests that are destroyed per minute is equal to the size of 48 football fields. That’s 48 football fields per minute! Some other impacts of deforestation include disruption of water cycles, increased soil erosion and disrupted livelihoods. I won’t even begin to mention the impact that it has on countless ecosystems and species of animals.

Of course, simply wasting paper isn’t the only reason for deforestation, but it is a significant piece of the problem.

Enter digital bullet journaling. I currently have over 300 pages in that I use in my digital bullet journal alone. This is not including all of the class notes, church notes, and random notes that I have stored in my Goodnotes folders. That is at least 500 pages of paper from the past few months that I have not wasted.

Although I am only one person, I know that if I can inspire at least 2 people to try to save more paper than I am doing my part. And if those people each inspire 2 more, and this chain continues, then we can see exponential growth of a population of people who save paper.

If this little write-up has inspired you to try to conserve paper, then I encourage you to give digital bullet journaling a try. If you need to be even more convinced, then check out my first blog post about 5 Reasons for Bullet Journaling. Check out my downloads page for some great apps that can be used for digital bullet journaling.

We all need to do our part. There is no way that one person can make a difference on their own, but if we all join together than we can make a huge positive impact on our planet.

Photos by @hlasicaphotography, download Goodnotes here!