Paper

Any idea how much you are contributing to deforestation with all those printing of lecture notes, tutorials, readings etc? You might be surprised to hear that patches of forests the size of 300 football fields are disappearing from India every hour as we speak now. But besides being surprised, are you going to do anything about it? You are probably going to argue that not all the deforestation activities are due to our incredible high usage of paper and you are most probably right. Deforestation can be due to clearing of land for agriculture purposes, infrastructure expansion etc. While at our level we might not be able to do anything about that, we do have a choice in helping reduce the rate of deforestation, if not stop it. Due to time constraint (and word limit constraint), I will not go into all the consequences of deforestation which I believe most of us are pretty familiar with.

As a NUS Science Faculty student, I can easily use up as many as 40 pieces of paper a week and I am sure I am not the heaviest user around. So can you imagine how much paper are used by all the NUS students every year? Besides assignments and tutorials which I have to submit, I print everything else on scrap paper which only has one of its sides used. I am sure most of us have experienced packing our notes at the end of every semester. For me, I was always very amazed at how much stuff I have printed, although how much stuff I have studied never fails to shock me too. And I can confidently say that most of the notes that we have printed will never be touched again after we're through with those modules! So what do you do with all those paper? How many of us are aware that during our final exam period, there is always a recycling corner set up at the SRC for students to throw away their papers after they have taken the examinations? If you don't know, maybe it's time that you sit down and start exploring the different ways and channels you can help in making this world a better place to live in. We are, after all, citizens of the Earth!

Is this the kind of future you have in mind for our children?

Research Question: Are students from the Science Faculty of NUS aware of the rate of deforestation and the effects that their heavy paper usage habits have on it?

Purpose Statement: The main objective would be to find out the level of awareness among the students on their own paper usage habits and if there is a need to improve the situation. Another objective would be to research on the extent of deforestation caused by the various human activities and how that has affected the lives on Earth.

Reason for Attitudinal Survey: We have to understand the paper usage habits of the students and their perspectives before we can decide on the appropriate actions that we can take when approaching this issue. Ultimately we want to raise the general level of awareness of the students on the consequences of deforestation caused by human activities and what we can do to curb it.