I feel somewhat relieved that I’m not consuming much paper anymore, given its storage and weight. In the offices, printers are less and less used. At home, books are replaced with e-books, newspapers with services like PressDisplay, and magazines with Zinio. Yes, I still use paper tissues, but that’s pretty much it.
Am I a traitor to our Canadian paper industry? Maybe, and I don’t care. Even with recycling, there is great waste in cutting down the trees and “processing” them with chemical and whatnot to make them the cheap, short-lived paper we are now accustomed to. Each time I see the waste and litter created by those free newspapers in the subway I cringe. Combine a culture of short-term consumerism and one of book reading and I won’t be saddened much by the demise of all those bookstores selling cheap (in all senses of the word) novels.
Maybe I’m supposed to reminisce those days in the libraries with some nostalgia, but I can’t. The fine dust almost made me allergic to books. The difficulty in accessing technical manuals. The lack of any decent search function in those manuals (The indices wouldn’t be too broad to be of use most times, or would take up half the manual). Just the shipping cost, and the environmental impact, of moving something that would fit hundreds of times on a micro SD card smaller than a penny seems absurd.
And don’t even get me started about writing on paper. Those heavy, messy electric typewriters. The horrible pains in handwriting countless class notes in school. The whole process was so messy before portable computers, I simply can’t go back.
So, paper, good riddance. If only you weren’t heavily subsidized like the corn industry…
Published on September 26, 2012 at 21:37 EDT
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