The Net Impact group at the Owen Graduate School of Management recently built a special display in the school’s stairwell.

The Smart Printing display was built using wasted paper found near Owen printers over a three-week span. The display is part of an educational campaign to discourage unnecessary printing and challenge the Owen community to reduce paper consumption YTD by 25 percent. While U.S. forests are growing, the rest of the world’s are not, and paper production and transportation require inordinate amounts of water and energy.

In 2008, Owen used approximately 4 million sheets of paper. According to papercalculator.org, this requires 56,000 lbs of wood, 156,602 gallons of wastewater and 18,227 lbs of solid waste. It’s hard to grasp the weight of these numbers, but considering the fact that this amount was generated by a community of only 600 people puts a perspective on national paper consumption and its impact. Paper consumption is further magnified at the end of its cycle as more than 1/3 of U.S. landfills are paper products.


Contact: Amy Wolf, (615) 322-NEWS
Amy.wolf@vanderbilt.edu