Sustainability focus for University of Calgary
I had a great discussion yesterday’s with the University of Calgary (UoC)’s CIO, Harold Esche, as he visited our Research Centre here in Grenoble. It was very refreshing to meet a C-level executive with such a clear and strong view on Sustainability, including Paper Consumption and Carbon Footprint.
The University of Calgary started on a journey to reduce paper consumption a few years ago – first realizing how abysmal their paper consumption was, then taking actions to reduce it, through advanced print fleet rationalization and other innovations.
As the UoC president stated: “In 2006, the University of Calgary community printed (consumed) 72 million pieces of paper. For those of you who prefer to think visually, consider that 500 sheets of paper is a stack 2 inches high. So, 72 million pieces of paper is a stack of paper 4.5 miles high – this is equivalent to about 38 Calgary Towers stuck one on top of another. ”
[Note: for those - like me - that haven't seen the Calgary tower, that's about 24 Eiffel towers or 19 Empire State Buildings - almost the Everest]
”By 2007, we had reduced our paper consumption to 56 million sheets, through a variety of interventions the most important of which likely was widespread introduction of desktop printers that were set for two-sided printing. That’s a saving of a stack of paper about one mile high. Good progress, but still an awful lot of trees.”
Building on an interesting computation that Harold made on his blog, if we could stack up all pages printed, one year’s worldwide “production” could take us between 5 and 15 times to the moon depending on the estimates… Not quite enough yet to take Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to destination, but we’re getting there ! 
