Posted on 03/28/2008 9:48:27 PM PDT by Comparative Advantage
Bowing to pressure from students, Ohio State University has decided to green up its paper supply.
Beginning July 1, the university will buy only recycled copy paper, saving an estimated 8,000 trees and keeping 382,000 pounds of waste out of landfills annually, according to the business office.
OSU uses nearly a half-million reams of paper each year, and only 35,000 had been recycled paper, said Helen DeSantis, assistant vice president for business operations.
The decision is a victory for Free the Planet, a campus group dedicated to improving the environment. Its members demonstrated on campus early last year and asked then-President Karen A. Holbrook to make OSU a leader in paper recycling.
"Free the Planet's effort in bringing this forward is why there's a policy," said graduate student Jane Harrison, 22, a member of the group. "It's a step in the right direction, but we feel the copy-paper policy is not moving OSU as far forward as it could be."
This month, President E. Gordon Gee ordered university offices to buy paper with at least 30 percent recycled content and to buy it through a central university office. Gee hopes the centralized purchasing, which wasn't done before, will help offset the estimated $300,000 more the recycled paper will cost.
That's a 14 percent cost increase, DeSantis said.
Her office is encouraging OSU employees to reduce paper use by printing on both sides, saving documents electronically and e-mailing instead of faxing.
"We believe we're in the lead on this," DeSantis said. Although many universities have policies for environmentally friendly paper, few require its use across campus, she said.
OSU sophomore Hudson McFann of Gahanna hopes the recycling effort will be expanded to other paper products on campus.
McFann, 20, is co-president of Students for a Sustainable Campus. Last month, he joined the university's Forest Resources Task Force, which recommended the change to recycled copy paper and is studying other ways to reduce virgin paper use.
"I was really surprised and impressed that the university would take such a large step when I found out what it would cost," McFann said.
Most of the university's toilet paper and paper towels have recycled content, so the task force will look at envelopes next, DeSantis said.
kgray@dispatch.com
Did you ever see that Penn & Teller episode about recycling? They said that most paper comes from trees planted to make paper. Those forests wouldn’t be planted if we didn’t need the paper. So the idea that using recycled paper saves trees... but nevermind, I’m sure it makes them feel good.
Ewww.
Useful idiots at OSU keeping the flame of communism burning at half power.
Yes, I like the “Bowing to pressure from students.” I’m currently a graduate student, and of course students appreciate it when their ideas are heard - but sometimes the students are wrong, and need to be told that.
I wonder what’s rarer - the hillsides full of trees planted and grown and harvested for paper, or the rivers drained to wash reclaimed paper over and over so that only a small percentage actually ends back up in paper?
Penn & Teller did a segment on how recycled paper is more polluting than virgin paper. Lots of chemicals involved in recycling paper.
Ohio State: the high school AFTER high school!
No wonder LSU wipped their a@#....
Got to hand it to them. They just don't ever seem to learn. Centralizing the purchasing will only lead to problems, especially when you have an organization like a university, which draws its funding from thousands of different sources, with lots and lots of different entailments and restrictions.
I can hear all the departments complaining about how hard it is to get the paper they ordered, and how they've got to order 50% more paper just to make sure they get enough in time. I can also already see the problem they're going to have with departments just going around the whole process and picking up boxes of paper from the nearest office supply store because it is faster, more reliable, and the office supply store will deliver on time.
Oh... yeah... great idea.
Much of recycling is not economically or environmentally worthwhile but it sure makes the leftys feel good. The left should consider the additional resources used to recycle paper products. The additional energy and harmful chemicals are an environmental negative compared to discarding in a landfill. Much of recycling is just another leftist boondoggle.
I wonder if the enviros realize that by ‘saving’ 8000 trees they’re simultaneously denying life to the 8000 cute little saplings that would have been planted to replace those trees? Oh, wait, living things dying at the earliest stages of life... they’d probably consider that a good thing.
Recycling paper DOES reduce the need for more landfill
space, but recycling paper DOES NOT save trees.
The trees that are used for making paper are generally
planted and grown for that specific purpose.
The majority of “pulp wood” comes from pine trees grown
in a planted plantation and the trees are typically cut
before they are 10 to 12 years old.
The older growth and larger trees are not used to make
paper, they are used to make plywood, and lumber, etc.
As we increase the amount of paper that is recycled,
we decrease the need to plant trees for this purpose.
Many land owners are not replanting their harvested pines,
many see more profit in growing corn for the ethanol market.
At least make it white paper.
It costs alot more so I get those tingly feelings of helping the economy while sticking my thumb in the eye of the eco-weenies.
No, the only thing that will offset an unnecessary $300,000 expense is an increase in revenue, or in other words, a nice tuition hike for OSU kids.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.