At UTS, for each subject students enroll in, we fill out a survey form indicating our feedback for the subject. This semester the uni has adopted an online system of surveys as opposed it's paper predecessor and to encourage us to do these online surveys, the uni has offered us incentives. Incentives I hear you say? Well for example I completed 5 surveys and at 5 pts a survey I am now entitled to either 5 pages of free printing or can donate 44 cents to The Smith Family! But what this hard copy to soft copy conversion really got me thinking about was the environmental initiatives that many companies, unis, etc. have started to implement with a focus on avoiding printing. For example, all UTS emails have the following tagline attached to them; "Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email." Other ones I've seen used to decrease/avoid printing:
- encouraging double sided printing (for the record, double sided printing = pet peeve)
- encouraging the use of recycled paper
- payment for printing can generally discourage people from printing unnecessary things at uni for example
My thoughts were, does all this really make a huge difference? I don't consider myself a huge "over printer" of things but sometimes I just like to read something in a hard copy, paper form. Am I hurting the environment?
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2 comments:
it's a phurphy. how about the power and natural resources consumed in the production and daily operations of (back-end) information technology to enable e-surveying, and any other form of e-whatever?
Anybody ever considered the huge energy consumed by data centres and the physical tools (data pipes, storage servers) that help deliver e-anything and everything?
That's a very good point, never really thought of that.
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