Ecological impact of paper

Running an environmentally friendly business helps reduce the impact on the environment and preserves natural resources. Not only does this benefit the environment but can also save crucial capital that can be utilised for greater social impact or better products and services.

At Layerise we focus on reducing the environmental impact for businesses that will otherwise with conventional tools not be able to. With our efforts, businesses can improve the sustainability of their business. In return, our clients are less dependent on natural resources than their competitors and have ways to deal with rising costs and an increase in demand for environmental neutral solutions.

Responsibility

Affordable, scalable solutions are now available to enable businesses to leapfrog to cleaner and more resilient solutions. The pace of change is faster than ever as more enterprises are turning to smart, digital and renewable solutions. On the other hand, we can do much more as the presence of digitalisation can increase the speed dramatically. To this day, we still see the evidence of lack of leadership and responsibility manifested by the industrial doings even if it by affordable adjustment could be conducted environmentally safe. Climate change is a global challenge that does not respect national borders. It is an issue that requires solutions that need to be coordinated at the international level and private enterprise need to show willingness and commitment to safeguard what we all treasure. Layerise, as a corporate agent in the vast commercial landscape, has taken the responsibility to carry out any action to ensure that our products and services concentrate on solutions that drive the agenda of ecological sound and prosperous impact.

Most countries have laws that mandate environmental compliance in various ways and forms. Every year more laws are passed on local, national, and international (Paris Agreement at the COP21 in Paris) levels as we understand how essential it is for the global health to become more environmentally cognizant. In business terms, going green also means getting ahead of the curve – if certain green laws aren’t put into action they soon will be and it gives enterprises a head start. On the international level, lawmakers are putting forward a truly mind-boggling comprehensive plan to reduce emissions and pollution, while promoting sustainability and actionable consequences, as well as incentives for being ahead of the green curve. At Layerise, we welcome the international legal push and we are committed by corresponding with great determination to build products and services that help companies to become environmentally neutral. Moreover, we also recognise the importance of political action on the environment and have made it clear that voting for scientifically fluent and eco-friendly leaders is a cornerstone of its sustainability message.

Layerise was founded on the premise that we could with the use of intelligent and digital innovation move the needle of how industries, nearly across the board, work with customer relationship especially during the full longevity of the post-sales life-span. We have taken the responsibility to come up with solutions that not only increase and improve commercial value but also enhance the end-user customer benefits, and importantly cut emission and pollution dramatically. In detailed terms, the conventional physical post-sales apparatus, evidently printed materials, is still by far the most applied way of building post-sales activities. This includes printed user guides, owner manuals, leaflets, registration forms, warranties and much more. For the naked eye, the materials used for the production of printed documentation of such sort is paper and ink, but the environmental impact of them is significant and unnecessary as will be demonstrated below. Our goal at Layerise is to diminish and completely remove the need for print and ink material for any purpose related to providing global consumers with product and service onboarding and help material. In our core, we believe and know that we can convert environmental positive impact into commercial growth for enterprises worldwide.

The damaging effect of paper and ink

Excluding the scientific and environmental focused community, most people that we have engaged tend not to think much about where the paper quantities their companies are absorbing are coming from. They basically have not seen any evidence for the ecological impact of paper production. Moreover, corporate heads have not studied the shortcomings and overpromised effects of activities relying on print and paper. However, we have learned that corporations of any size are extremely responsive as we declare how paper, in all its various forms, affects the environment in a significant damaging way and how it falls short on being the medium for post-sales impact in the twenty-first century.

The way we define paper and ink pollution

Paper and ink (ink cartridges) pollution refers to environmental pollution caused by the production, use and recycling of paper and ink (ink cartridges).

Traditional paper, not synthetic paper, is made from wood pulp. That pulp comes from freshly cut trees. Once the paper is used as a communication tool, the remainings are converted into cardboard materials for packaging. The current global demand on paper usage means that 40% of all world’s commercial cut timber is used for the production of paper. In addition, the production of paper has been leaving a major impactful dent on world’s ecology. Tree removal practices like deforestation remove habitat for world’s wildlife and eliminate the foundations that secure minimal erosion in areas that rely on tree roots for support. In terms of practical production, the amount of land and energy it takes to harvest farmed trees for paper production is vast and unrecoverable.

Not only does deforestation displace and even remove the foundation for wildlife, farms and production facilities of various kinds take up valuable real estate that could be dedicated to wildlife habitats and recovery. At the same time, local environments in close proximity of farms and paper production facilities are being damaged due to the releases of large amounts of chlorine for bleaching and large quantities of dioxins. In terms of the energy required to cutting, logging and process trees into paper results in CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere, contributing to the increase of greenhouse gasses, which in return increases the climate change impact.

While paper production represents various forms of environmental challenges the impact of paper is even broader. In North America, paper and pulp are the third largest industrial pollutants, paper products are making up 35% of solid waste that goes to the landfills. In fact, most of the materials in landfills are made of paper. When paper rots, it goes through a set of phases and emits methane (second most pollutant greenhouse gas). Yet, when the paper does not end up in landfills but instead is burned the result is CO2.

Equal to paper, when it comes to ink (in other words toner) the balance between manufacturing and environmentally safe underdoing is way off. Manufacturing just one single ink cartridge emits around 4.8kg CO2. Note that this emission is just for the cartridge container, and does not include the ink. The LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) of the ink shows evidence that the greenhouse gas emissions are in the proximity of 16 metric tons for every 1 metric ton of ink manufactured. It is estimated that for a cartridge that yields five thousand pages in roughly containing 200 grams of toner, which in return results in a CO2 emission per cartridge is 3.2 kg. Even more, a large abundance of ink and cartridge waste can be reduced, or in practice eliminated by reusing and recycling, yet it is estimated that 50% of all ink cartridges are simply not due to associated costs.

At this moment, knowing this should make us refrain from overusing and misusing trees as the natural resource as it’s far from sustainable, ecologically healthy and especially as same results or even greater prosperity can be achieved by utilising various kind of digital solutions. Yet the world consumes around 300 million tons of paper each year. We and our collective team at Layerise are committed to pushing for change by providing digital-only, cost-effective, intelligent and eco-friendly solutions.