Inspired by Colin’s Earth Day post, I started to wonder exactly how much paper is being saved by ePortal users.  I made a few calculations (and a few assumptions, so please bear with me) and I came up with some interesting numbers.

Alex, our VP, tells us that to date we have processed about 1 million business documents through ePortal.  If we imagine each one of these documents as a single sheet of paper saved (probably a lowball estimate), my first calculation tells us that this would be equal to about one million sheets of paper (thank you, university education).

To put this in perspective, a stack of paper this size would be approximately 100 meters high which is as tall as a ten story building, or a vertical football field, if you will.

If you were to lay these sheets end to end, it would span about 289 kilometers which would take you about three hours to drive on the highway.

The stack would weigh about 9900 pounds, roughly the same as an average African elephant.

It would take the average laser printer about 46 days to print this many pages.

What I’m really trying to say is this is A LOT of paper!  Naturally, the next question would be “how many trees is this?”

The folks at the paper mill tell me that there are an average of 8333 sheets of paper in a single tree, which means that to date, ePortal has saved about 120 trees.  An acre of rainforest in Borneo has approximately 244 trees.

Alex also tells me that we push about 4000 documents through ePortal every day, so if we extrapolate this, by January 1, 2010 ePortal will have saved over an acre of rainforest!  Not bad at all, if you ask me.

Keep it green,

Dave Irons

P.S. Don’t even think about printing this!

References

http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

http://earthday.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-many-trees-do-you-get

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/fastFaqLiteDocument?lc=en&cc=lt&dlc=lt&docname=c00312638

Thickness of a sheet = 0.1  mm

Length of a sheet = 28.94 cm

HP 1020 Laser printer: 15 ppm

Weight of a sheet of paper = 4.5 g

1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

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