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Plan to Go Paperless on Arbor Day and Plant a Tree

Posted by Lior Weinstein on Friday, April 26th, 2013

Arbor Day is held on the last Friday of April. Today is the day to plant a tree, or trees. It’s also the time to consider how you use paper. By going paperless you will save trees and have enough money left to plant some more.

Image source: Arborbanking.com

Julius Sterling Morton said: “Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.”

While Arbor Day has become an international celebration, it was founded by newspaper editor, Julius Sterling Morgan in Nebraska City, Nebraska on April 10, 1872. It is believed that approximately one million trees were planted on that day.

Why plant trees? For one thing, they beautify our nation. They provide shade and give off oxygen. Trees act as a filter to clean the air, which is why they are even more important in urban areas.

Look outside your office window. Are their trees around? Unless you are in the heart of a large city you probably have trees in sight. Even in the city, there are probably small trees in planters. We pay a lot of money for landscapers to design the grounds of our office buildings and bring in trees because they add value to the land and aesthetic appeal.

It’s difficult to find anything negative to say about this gift of nature. Too bad we have slowly been destroying our forests, not just in North America, but around the world. For years we have treated paper like the end all and be all of the business world. We mailed out flyers, bills and catalogs. If we were typing and made a mistake we threw the paper in the garbage and it wasn’t recycled.

Image source: Biztechmagazine.com

We’ve made a lot of progress in this regard. We recycle. We type on computers where we can make corrections and only print out the final product. But we still print, we still copy, we fax and we still waste tons of paper.

Why do we print out emails we have already read? You can always save them. Why do we print out PDF documents when we only want to input that information into a spreadsheet? Why not use a PDF to Excel converter to bypass the printing of these documents. You’ll save paper, time and money.

If you plan on planting a lot of trees today, you could make a spreadsheet to measure the progress of your growing trees. Use the PDF converter to add a description and a photograph of the species you have planted.

Image source: Mweanpl.blogspot.com

Why don’t you open a spreadsheet right now and start keeping track off all the paper you use? Make a column for paper that you dispose of and paper that you realize you didn’t have to use in the first place if you had been working more effectively. This will give you a clearer picture of just how much paper you are using. Don’t forget to count the paper products you use at home.

Once you see the results, you this will encourage you to make a change.