Dickeson--Don't Be Stupid About Paper

Remember the WOW—War on Waste—campaign back in the mid-1970s? It gave us focus on the usage of paper to enhance productivity a quarter of a century ago. It's time to refresh our perspectives, renew the immediacy of that message, re-charge our batteries.

To illustrate the significance of paper, let's take an extreme example. The new web offset presses are not only faster, they're wider. One of those new presses, printing for 55 percent of available hours in a year, consumes 35,000 tons of roll stock. At $50 a hundredweight, that comes to $35 million annually! (Those numbers do have a way of narrowing the focus, don't they? It truly is all about the paper, isn't it?) Just a single percentage point of paper used in a year to operate that press is worth $350,000.