So, just how wasteful is a classroom?
The first step to creating a more sustainable classroom is to understand the practices that make it wasteful in the first place and educate people about the problem. Despite being some of the most technologically-savvy organizations around, colleges and universities still produce a tremendous amount of physical and energy waste. In fact, a recent study* estimates the annual waste from campuses at "5.8 million tons, or about 2.5 percent of the U.S. solid waste stream," a perhaps surprisingly large number. It also turns out that half of this is paper alone, averaging 320 pounds yearly for each student. In today's sophisticated and connected world, much of this is unnecessary and even less convenient for both instructor and student.
While campuses produce countless waste variants, for the purpose of this site we will focus on the primary form of waste that can be reduced through user-centered learning technologies: paper. We have found that the typical course environment, between handouts, homework, syllabi, tests, and projects, (not to mention textbooks), uses upwards of 200 sheets of paper per student, per course. In other words, the instructor teaching 120 students across 4 course sections will go through close to 25,000 sheets of paper each term. And to make matters worse, it turns out that the vast majority of this paper will only be used once before being tossed out. It is pure waste.
To put it another way, if you're an institution with 4,000 students taking 10 courses per year, over 8 million sheets of paper, or 960 trees, are being used to support your academic activities each year, not at all good for the environment, but not a cheap proposition either.
Fortunately, many technology platforms already exist to support the paperless classroom transformation, such as learning management systems, eBooks, and online syllabus. By working with these technologies, we can teach the world that the alternatives to paper are more accessible than ever before and come with a host of benefits for students, instructors, administrators, and the environment.
*Ecodemia : Campus Environmental Stewardship at the Turn of the 21st Century by Julian Keniry.