Saving the Earth One Tree at a Time

Earth Day 2021 is this Thursday, April 22. It’s an important day for people to take time out of their busy lives to consider the impact that humanity has on the environment and for taking steps to minimize these impacts.

We at Spider Strategies have a particular focus on forest conservation. Why? Because using Spider Impact can lead to a great reduction in the use of paper within organizations across the globe. More on that in a bit.

In the United States alone, businesses use 21 million tons of paper annually, and 71% of office waste consists of paper. Check out these stats from TonerBuzz:

• Currently, companies in the US spend over $120 billion per year on print-outs.
• Most of these print-outs become outdated in just three months.
• In general, approximately 45% of all pages printed in the offices eventually end up in the trash.
• A typical document gets copied 9-11 times.
• Altogether paper consumption in business keeps growing. Paper use in an average business grows by 22% a year.
• The average office worker in the US goes through roughly 10,000 sheets of paper each year.
• Employees spend 30-40% of their time looking for information locked in email and filing cabinets.

On a more personal level:

• The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
• Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
• Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.

Why Forest Conservation?

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that U.S. forests absorb between one million and three million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, offsetting between 20 percent and 46 percent of the country's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Additionally, trees help protect against climate impacts such as flooding. By catching rainwater, reducing erosion, and creating more permeable soils, trees help prevent nearly 400 billion gallons of runoff annually in the continental U.S., which is enough water to fill about 600,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Trees are equally crucial for water and air quality. According to Climate Central, over half of Americans depend on forests to capture and filter their drinking water. Tree leaves also absorb airborne pollutants and intercept particulate matter, helping reduce the throat irritation, asthma, and even premature death that these pollutants may cause. By annually removing over 35 billion pounds of these pollutants in the continental U.S., trees prevent over half a million cases of acute respiratory symptoms each year.

Remove Paper from Your Reporting

A printed board pack can be anywhere from 40 pages to 500 pages (or more) depending on the kind of information that needs to be reviewed.

Spider Impact completely removes paper from your performance reporting to the Board, or for management meetings, and even team meetings. Imagine an online meeting where you share informative, intuitive dashboards, reports, and KPIs in an interactive, multi-slide briefing…complete with the ability to drill down into interesting data points and access background information, and then return to your briefing with a click, and without losing a step. That’s what Spider Impact lets you do.

Not only will you have the best, most productive management and Board meetings ever, but you’ll also be saving the Earth—one tree at a time.

Let us show you how to revolutionize your management meetings and say goodbye to paper in performance reporting. Request a free test drive or demo.