This blog post is an online (thus, not on paper) of my thoughts about paper (on paper).
I recently went to a fair – 2011.06.17-19 Femei pe Mătăsari, second day – Get a result now! (it could be just about any fair) – where a lot of people wanted to give me flyers. More than this, some of them took my refuse to take any kind of flyer / card rather personally: „Hmm, what does this guy has against us?”.
So what do I have against taking paper?
- There are a lot of forms & solutions for recycling things; once you read a piece of paper, you can recycle it in various ways; but no recycling solution is 100% perfect, and as long as even transportation costs some money, if you use a foreign object and you need to take it somewhere to recycle it, you probably contributed to pollution;
- I had a camera, with which I could have transformed the printed solution in an electronic one; OK, there is a waste even electronically, but on my 1 terabyte hard-drive, 3 images worth of 10 MegaBytes of data, in total, represent something like: 1/100,000=0.001%; I think it’s fine to consume 0.001 percent of my hard-drive;
- Sorry to annoy a lot of people with this, but a huge part of what I get on a flyer is irrelevant (I won’t ever use the information, it’s mostly advertising – even if for NGOs);
At the fair, some people were – „Uuu, why do you do that? Why won’t you take our flyer?”; I hope that above I’ve answered this – because a flyer contributes to pollution of the planet, it’s largely irrelevant and I can get the same information electronically.
It’s a bit ironic & amusing the fact that at the fair the overall spirit would most likely be in favor of ecology. On the other hand, saying „No!” to something is considered impolite – say „Yes!” to everything. So much for critical thinking.
I think it’s fair to apply this logic to a lot of the flyers given to you.