On Wednesday, June 5th, we celebrated World Environment Day. This is the day we remind ourselves about the damage we cause to our planet. It’s also meant to help us finally realize that it is critical to change our behaviour.
Choosing to waste less paper by going digital ties in very well with this narrative.
We’ll cover all these points in this blog post, but in relation to another important day – World Oceans Day. It’s celebrated on June 8th and is a great push to the fact that together, we can protect and restore our oceans.
We also wish to focus more on paper pollution. Because this specifically is what we can help to prevent.
So what’s going on with paper ocean pollution today?
You may not even imagine how damaging paper is for the environment. All tree-based paper is ecologically damaging, and it’s hard to find the paper that does the least damage.
The newspapers and cardboard boxes that we throw into the recycling cans are mostly made from recycled paper. And with every reuse they are treated with chemicals and water to remove the inks and impurities.
The leftover sludge of ink, chemicals and water is either buried in a landfill or burned at the paper mill for energy.
Paper manufacturing requires huge quantities of water. That’s why paper mills are usually located near lakes and waterways. Water discharged from the manufacturing process is high in organic matter. This leads to eutrophication. It’s when organic pollutants nourish phytoplankton, which then reproduce rapidly and consume so much oxygen that fish and other species die.
How does it affect me?
Using PDFfiller already saves at least 87.9 trees per month. When it comes to water, you can’t think about proper figures.
Instead of the figures, you can think about the quality of your life depending on your own behaviour towards nature and the environment.
Ocean provides over 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe and over 97 percent of the world’s water supply. Ocean pollution does not only affects marine life and their environment, it also affects mankind.
Chemicals that are discharged from paper manufacturing can contaminate water supplies and our food chain by affecting the marine life involved. If humans are exposed to these toxic chemicals for long periods of time, then this can result in dangerous health problems, which include hormonal issues, reproductive issues, and damage to our nervous systems and kidneys.
Be a part of a change for the better
According to The World Counts, 50% of all waste businesses produce is paper.
But it’s not even worth it.
Paper is robbing us of our productivity. The average employee runs more than 10,000 documents per year. In terms of paper, this costs about $100. If you add in the cost of ink, toner, energy and time spent on searching for documents, manually filling them out and printing, this figure more than doubles.
Moreover, almost any paper-based workflow carries a potential threat to data security. It should be taken into account that nearly 15% of all business documents become lost, with up to one-third of an organization’s time being spent on trying to recreate them.
Read our step-by-step guide to a total paperless transition HERE. Enhance your business with digital tools and become an integral part of humanity that is changing the world for the better.
