· sustainability · 3 min read
Replace Trees with Ones and Zeros - QR Codes and Sustainability
Did you know that 10,000 A4 pages equal one tree? For every page that doesn't need to be printed, resources are saved that our planet needs more than we do.
I Have an Important Message!
Information available on the internet doesn’t need to be distributed in other ways.
There. That’s how it is. It’s not any more complicated than that.
The display outside your office meeting room that shows Outlook information about room availability - it’s really not needed. Neither is the one in the next room.
The property brochure you received when you viewed a new house last Saturday - that’s not needed either. None of those 27 pages of house pictures and exciting plot information are necessary.
That binder in the hotel room that shows if the reception is open, and maybe sometimes helps you find your Wi-Fi password - guess what - it’s not needed.
And so on, I think everyone understands.
Again - if something already exists on the internet, then it doesn’t really need to be in other forms. If we’re being honest.
What Does This Have to Do with QR Codes?
QR codes are a way to find things on the internet. Like a link, but not quite, and QR codes have a physical location as well. Printed or painted on something, for example.
So if you have something that exists both on the internet and that you also print on paper, or even worse, display on expensive screens to show a copy of, you can use a QR code instead and ask your users to use their mobile phones instead of receiving paper or looking at your screen.
A Bit More About Trees
Trees are important. 10,000 A4 pages equal one tree. It’s unclear how many trees a monitor in a meeting room costs.
In Sweden, we have about 87 million trees.
Let’s do some math. The realtor from Saturday has, let’s say, 10 viewings a week, and each viewing has 20 brochures ready for buyers. Each brochure has an average of 30 pages. So, 30 _ 20 _ 10 * 52 in a year (realtors always work, I’ve heard). Per realtor, that’s 312,000 pages, or 32 trees.
There are about 8,000 realtors in Sweden, so that’s approximately 248,000 trees per year. Imagine if a QR code leading to a digital brochure could replace paper brochures instead?
I apologize to all realtors out there; we don’t mean to say you are environmental offenders, but it’s just an example of how to think about these kinds of issues.
And if we think a bit further, there are very many situations where you could imagine that a QR code could save a tree or more?