Wistfully Wasteless

There are few better ways to start a day than with the breakfast and the morning newspaper.

Those gray pages are not just a source of information, but also the product of hard work and devotion; they convey news hierarchically, not linearly, giving the reader a sense for what is most important, not just what happened most recently.

Even the most mundane newspaper layout is a combination of art and psychology, the result of painstaking reworking designed to catch your eye and tell you all you need to know, concisely, unequivocally, and wittily.

But the beauty of paper-based media does not change the fact that, as this page often moans, “Paper is so 20th century,” which is why I, as part of Harvard College’s Resource Efficiency Program, am helping to implement a pilot project in Winthrop and Currier that allows students to opt out of receiving the paper at their doors daily.

The program, which also allows students to opt out of delivery of other student publications and fliers, aims to reduce the use of paper on campus.

It is with a heavy heart that I support this program, which is informally called the “door-drop waste reduction program.” In short, this program assumes that, in many instances, paper use equals paper waste.

Consider this comparison: Suppose the average student reads three articles a day in The Crimson, spending a total of 15 minutes doing so. Apply this assumption to the approximately 6400 students on campus over 200 weekdays per academic year. The result? 320,000 hours spent reading The Crimson per year. If all that reading were done on computers, it would result in the equivalent reduction of 1.23 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But simply making the paper necessary to print one copy of The Crimson for every room on campus results in the production of 2116 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Even the use of 100 percent recycled newsprint only shaves the figure down to 1,042 metric tons, still nearly a thousand-fold difference. And those figures do not include the environmental impacts of shipping and printing.

Of course, simplistic assumptions yield simplistic results. In the real world, some rooms on campus never remove their daily copy from their door, while other rooms regularly collect—and presumably go on to read—every publication that is dropped there.

The door drop waste reduction campaign seeks to put an end only to the former.

Unlike similar programs established in various Houses in the past, for this campaign, publications that get regularly dropped in rooms across campus have agreed to decrease their print runs commensurately to the number of rooms that opt out of delivery, though problems with enforcement of student preferences have plagued the early weeks of the pilot. That way, wasteful paper use will be diminished without altering the publications’ regular readership. At the same time, the plan is to increase the publications’ availability in common areas.

My hope is that the door drop waste reduction program will spread across campus, raising students’ awareness of the fundamental tenet of environmentalism that it is more beneficial to reduce consumption than to recycle—though both are, of course, better than outright waste.

I won’t weigh in on the ongoing debates over the future of printed newsmedia. Instead, I’ll continue relishing my opportunity to sit down for breakfast with my newspaper and a cup of coffee knowing that at least I’m putting my copy to good use.



Jonathan B. Steinman ‘10, a Crimson sports editor, lives in Winthrop house.