Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Cut Down On Our Town Newsletters


I do not understand why I received 3 different newsletters - SPRING, Tampines Tempo and Tampines Changkat in July 2008! One is already too many (started off with Tampines Tempo), then followed by SPRING and now Tampines Changkat.

Frankly I do not bother to read any of these and I wonder how many households really bother to read it? They are of much better quality than our newspaper (of course) and in full color too. All 3 newsletters paper are quite thick and especially the Tampines Changkat quality is very good. Personally I find these very wasteful and much cost have been spent on printing these newsletters. Maybe the respective organisations can consider using online media instead of print media. Although some like the SPRING by the North East Community Development Council is a bi-monthly issue, it will be much better to consider cutting down on the use of paper. The Tampines Changkat has a portal but use it to archive the print media instead of replacing it - I find it weird...

If we have BYOBD on every Wednesday to cut down the use of plastic bags, we should also cut down on the use of paper too. I am not suggesting to use recycled paper for the newsletter as the recycled paper price now may still be higher than new paper. Moreover, a recycling mill may consume more fossil fuels than a paper mill.

To give you an idea how much energy is used to produce new paper, below shows how much energy is conserved by using recycled paper instead of new paper;

CONSERVING through recycling:
A ton of paper made from recycled fibers instead of virgin fibers conserves:
-
7,000 gallons of water
-
17-31 trees
-
4,000 KWh of electricity
-
60 pounds of air pollutants
Source : Energy Kid's Page

Come on, let's GO GREEN! Cut down on Global Warming.



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