Below are some conservative calculations on the amount of TREES it takes to get some good-old-fashioned paper. Not vellum, newspaper, or high-end virgin paper for magazines, just regular, stick in the copier paper. - A "pallet" of paper contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton, - 1 carton contains 10 reams of paper, - 1 ream contains 500 sheets of paper - 1 pallet of (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees, - 1 carton uses 60% of 1, 40ft tall tree, - 1 ream uses 6% of 1, 40ft tall tree, Bear with me… A standard plan page (Architectural D) is 24 x 36. It takes roughly 9 sheets of ‘regular' paper to equal this size, so if the average project has 50 plan sheets and 150 spec pages printed front to back then the average project uses 600 sheets of ‘regular' paper. To make this easier on my brain and less boring for you, we'll say that a construction project will use 1 ream of paper instead of 1.2. If you bid 15 projects a month you use 12 trees per year. Multiply that by 10,000 contractors and then all of a sudden we are up to 120,000 trees cut down to service those projects. Now, you may have made great strides to procure documents electronically, but alas you are at the mercy of the provider. If we procured, say 15% electronically, we can reduce the tree count to ‘only' 102,000. But what about recycled paper? Ok, multiply the number of trees needed to make a ton of the kind of paper you're talking about then multiply by the percent recycled content in the paper. For example, 1 ton (40 cartons) of 30% postconsumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees 1 ton of 50% postconsumer content copier paper saves 12 trees. The numbers of projects bid and contractors cited are very conservative but you still begin to see the impact. At the moment it is a necessary evil, but there are things we CAN do. ...Next time, I'll talk about how we can reduce the impact on trees by using our computers to do takeoffs. DD