GreenTech Reduce Paper Survey!

Did you know that on average every adult and child in the US is responsible for the destruction of 9 full-grown trees per year? That’s equivalent to a forest of over 2.7 billion trees. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) deforestation continues at an alarming rate — about 50,000 square miles per year, equivalent to an area roughly the size of Nicaragua, the largest country in Central America.

Next week, TechSoup.org will launch the Reduce Paper Use Challenge to encourage nonprofits and public libraries to use technology to reduce their paper use and thereby reduce their environmental impact.

Before we launch our challenge, we want to get a sense of where nonprofits are with regard to paper consumption and what the hurdles are to implementing some paper saving techniques technologies. We encourage you to take a few moments to complete our baseline survey.

Then during the month of November, TechSoup's GreenTech Initiative will host the Reduce Paper Use Challenge with 5 concrete things your organization can do to reduce your use of paper. Of course we’ll publish articles and hold events to help you better understand how to make these concrete changes work at your organization.

After the campaign, we’ll invite you to send us your brief story on how you reduced your paper usage in your office, and do a short post survey. Participants will be eligible to win a free MyFax account so that you can send and receive electronic faxes instead of printing to paper.

Even if you can't take the official challenge, please do take the survey to help us better shape the campaign, and check back next week for more on our educational campaign and our challenge.

We have also set up a nonprofit GreenTech email listserv group on Google that you can subscribe to if you would like to communicate directly with the growing community of people working in nonprofits and libraries who are interested in greening their organizations.

Keep watching for more and share your thoughts today!