A contest to reduce paper consumption—by several hundred thousand pages—is underway at the Yale School of Public Health as a local response to the global health threat posed by climate change.
Paper production in the United States is currently the fourth largest industrial source of CO2 emissions, an important factor in changing weather patterns. The school’s Sustainability Committee is sponsoring the competition with the goal of cutting consumption by 20 percent. The winning department or group will receive $5,000 to fund a sustainability project. The six-month contest began this week, as part of the university-wide Celebrate Sustainability Week, and runs through March.
Last year, YSPH printed more than a million pages of paper, and that is only from shared printers, said Professor Robert Dubrow, faculty director of the Yale Climate Change and Health Initiative at the School of Public Health. When pages from private printers are added, the number is much higher.
“Paper is good to focus on, because we use a lot of it,” he said. “And there are specific things we can do to reduce our paper use.”
Those actions include double-sided printing and electronic document storage, including reference collections. As part of the contest, the Sustainability Committee’s student assistant will help people with the skills they’ll need to reduce paper consumption. To figure out which department or group is the winner, paper consumption totals during the next six months will be compared with the previous year’s October through March totals.
Paper is good to focus on, because we use a lot of it and there are specific things we can do to reduce our paper use.
Robert Dubrow
The competition is open to eight groups at the school, including the five academic department, M.P.H. students, M.S. and Ph.D. students and administration.
The winning team can use the prize money in a variety of ways, as long as it promotes sustainability. Some possibilities are replacing energy-inefficient lighting with LED lights; hosting a lecture series on sustainability and health, or supporting a student research project on sustainability and health.
Arsalan Ahmed, an M.P.H. student at Yale, is available to offer advice and technical help on reducing paper use. Contact him at arsalan.ahmed@yale.edu for more information on the contest or to get help with technical questions.
For more information on the Yale Climate Change and Health Initiative, visit publichealth.yale.edu/climate/.