The trees of the world are thankful for the online revolution. Sure, from 1995-2000, Canada doubled it’s paper production, and paper usage has been estimated to have increased by 40% since the popularization of e-mail[1], but just think of the amount of knowledge out there on the World Wide Web; tree-friendly information. A major advantage of online communication is the availability of knowledge without sacrificing our environment.
It’s impossible to say exactly how many web sites there are on the World Wide Web, due to it’s dynamic nature, but, according to Thomas Boutell’s calculations based on there being over 108 million individual websites counted by the Netcraft Web Server Survey in February, there are at least 19.2 billion individual web pages[2]. A ream of paper weighs about 6 lbs, so 19.2 billion pages is the equivalent of 115,200 tons of paper just to print off every site once. That’s a lot of information available without harming a single being of deciduous or coniferous ancestry.
Granted, the accuracy of a lot of the information on the web is suspect, but, having such a huge amount of information at my fingertips, with out defoliating our world is a strong advantage of online communication. Now we just have to get people to stop printing off all of their e-mails.
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[1] The ePaper Revolution; Geographical; Aug2005, Vol. 77 Issue 8, p36-37, 2p, 1c Ebsco Host, Acedemic Search Elite, kwd: paper usage
[2] WWW FAQs: How Many Websites Are There?. Boutell.com, 2-15-2007 Thomas Boutell. http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html
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1 comment:
You're right! Excellent take on the subject, well supported.
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