Page waste in university education

   Too much paper is being wasted in the pseudo-papers and formal documentation inherited from old times. Large companies save our bill papers, encouraging us to check our accounts through the Internet, which is more for their own benefit rather than for the environment. On the other hand there is no standardization of bill papers and one may be as big as 1/2 A4 sheet ... Because of this I decided to write to several institutions to think over the matter with me. Some things taken for granted in most cases take a long time to be noticed. Yes, actually it is a trifle. But let me remind you of the great old saying "Drop by drop - it becomes a lake". If you do not pay attention to the small things, we can not fix the big problems. Everything is connected in this eco-human system.



And here is the letter:
My special thanks to my wife - Poli, and a good friend of mine - MorriyaMurya (that's his nickname of course) for taking their time as correctors for the letter.

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Recipients:

UNIBIT, Sofia

 Director of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, Youth and Science,      Bulgaria

 European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth

 BDS, Bulgaria (member of ISO)

Hello,

I'm Marin Kolev, a student at UNIBIT (Sofia, Bulgaria), fourth year. I am addressing you in relation to a problem which has worried me for a long time, namely – page waste in university education. I will try to be as clear as possible.

We live in times of struggle with the human ego, arising in the effort to preserve the nature around ourselves. And despite numerous green initiatives, some wasteful practices have not changed and no one is discussing them (or at least I have not heard of such discussion). Maybe this is not a big problem, but considering it on a global scale – it may prove to be.

1. Two-sided printing is unacceptable. Why? Printers nowadays are using laser technology and even for 80 g/m² paper is not a problem to bear duplex printing. But even if there was a better paper and/or printing technology, I do not think anyone would change the requirements. If prints are duplex, one student's work would be reduced in half. Here I’d like to compliment some of my teachers who use the back of old works for printing tasks/tests for exercises.

2. In my university there is a standard for writing essays, assignments and other papers. This is great, of course! But I can not agree with all its points. I understand that there should be space for binding and uniform view for easy orientation, but this standard is also defining text size: 14 points and line spacing of 1.5 lines. I think it is too much! 12 points is enough for the text to be readable. One of my old works – 10 pages at 12 points and single line spacing is equal to 18-21 standard pages! This is double the cost of paper and ink required!

I have no observations and I cannot speak for any other university in the European Union or the world, so I just take my own university for example. If we combine both points raised in this letter, we get a quarter of the current cost for writing a students work! But one of the main requirements for writing an independent work is the size, in most cases. A submitted work of 30 pages seems sufficient. Compared to 15 or 7 pages it is disproportional, but does size define quality? We all know that it does not. I hope you will consider reducing the required size proportionally or changing the concept of considering the size as an important characteristic. I have witnessed how colleagues write with huge gaps in their works. For example – pages are wasted on a single line from the last page, because of huge paragraph spacing, etc., just for the sole purpose of increasing the size to fit the requirements (when doing a work off the standard if there is any).

The introduction of a standard limits those tricks concerning the amount of work, for which I commend my university, but paper is still being wasted. And if there are no standards – the opportunities for tricks and waste prevail. Of course, much depends on the form of education, but still, I think that this problem affects a large part of university education. Therefore I hope that you will coordinate and come up with an international standard (or point me towards already existing one) that will lead to a more regulated and environmentally friendly education!

Thank you for your time!

P.S. I intend to publicize this request in my blog.



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