Letter to the editor

To the Editor,

I am writing about an issue that is of concern to the entire student community.

Here in the library where I work, students are printing too many unnecessary documents. I don’t think everyone is aware of how much paper costs, let alone how much of it is being wasted. We can easily go through more than a box of paper a day, which is more than 5,000 pages.

Many times, people print twice because they don’t see it come out right away, not realizing that other people are ahead of them in the print queue. This leaves us with hundreds of pages of wasted paper a day and the costs are adding up.

Things were fine until about two years ago, but now an obscene amount of paper is wasted. Students are even printing stuff to take with them that they don’t need. One student printed a 500-page Shakespeare book that you can read for free on hundreds of Web sites.

This kind of irresponsibility is costing the university hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year, and it only ends up costing the students more.

Due to this, Academic Computing is looking into ways to charge students for printer use by requiring them to log in. We are one of the very few remaining institutions that allow unlimited free printing for all students. This privilege is abused and has been taken for granted. Now every student will pay for the rash actions of probably five to ten percent of the student body. Maybe if students stop wasting paper, Academic Computing will reconsider.

Another problem is the amount of paper that is put in the trash cans rather than the recycle bins. Paper should be recycled, not put in landfills.

This April 22 is the 40th annual Earth Day. This year, also make it “print nothing day.”

-Ted Merriman
Warner Memorial Library