Payless with paperless

BANGKOK — Paper making requires a tremendous amount of energy and natural resources. It uses trees and water as the primary materials, an A4 piece of paper requires 10 liters of water per sheet. According to the Green Chula official website, the paper is considered one of the most common types of rubbish at the university. According to Thai Health Promotion Foundation, Thai people consume paper at an average of 3.9 million tons or around 60 kilograms per year per person. Hence, about 55 million trees need to be cut down every year to satisfy that need. For each ton of paper produced, about 1.36 tons of CO2 emissions are released into the atmosphere with 31,500 liters, 4.1-megawatt hours, and 17 trees cut down.

Thai Civil Rights and Investigative Journalism’s research shows that garbage, in general, will be separated into two type, recyclable and non-recyclable.

Recyclable garbage consists of 19% paper, 13% plastic, 8% glasses and 5% metal. The 19% waste paper is considered as 2.47 million tons in Thailand.

“When we constantly reduce the paper, our place will be free of waste paper. Moreover, our world will be better because we don’t need to cut down trees for the wasting paper anymore.” Ph.D. Asso.Prof. Kanchit Malaiwong said in Thai.

Chula Center of Central Administration official website states that Chulalongkorn University is looking forward to being a digital university by applying LessPaper project. However, this is applied to Chula offices only.

Wisut Tangchittiphokhin wrote an article in Affix Technology about LessPaper in Action. The article shows that Chulalongkorn University has implemented the term in office since August 2015.

There are normally 50,000 issues per month in the office. By replacing paper with digital systems, it can reduce 500,000 pieces of paper per month with half document processing time reduced.

According to Exteen website, a writer named Darkuril also raise awareness about the effects of using a lot of paper in university excluding office zone.

“Professor gives us homework and asks us to edit it many times. It is considered of wasting paper and money”, said in Thai.

“When will the Thai education system be seriously aware of this problem and use electronic devices instead of paper?” he added.

Mick Elmore, the Chulalongkorn professor, also added that there are 3R which is Reduced, Reuse, and Recycle. Reduce is the best choice because you don’t waste it at the first place. It is better to use electronics to save the paper. Some country adopt this idea in their university already

“From my exchange program experience in Seoul, professors required students to send assignments via the online system, very convenient and eco-friendly. Chula should do the same.” Titirat Sengsakdi, 3rd year Chulalongkorn university student.

“Not only submitting via email, but it’s also more convenient and time-saving. It saves a lot of paper because students have a lot of assignment. Moreover, Chula should adopt this system to save the Earth.” said by Varinthorn Eamkrasasin, a Thai student who went for an exchange in Singapore.

A leading US university, Yale, has already implemented a paperless project to replace paper-based processes with electronic systems.

The concept refers to a working environment where the creation, modification, storage, and retrieval of documents happen electronically.

“We must take more steps to remove the paper from our lives and embrace the digital reality”, Russell Sharp, Senior Director of Yale ITS Management Services, said.

“For some of us it is a habit of a lifetime and will be hard to break, but as a team, we can do it together,” he added.