Greentailing and the 64 Thousand Tree Problem – Can Lessening POS Paper Usage Preserve the World?
Is thermal paper usage at the checkout by place-of-sale receipt printers the future concentrate on for Greentailers in there bid for carbon neutrality?
Thermal receipt printers in retail suppliers are everyday consuming hundreds of hundreds of rolls of thermal paper. They do so while executing their position of printing receipts that invariably are discarded inside an hour of leaving the retailer. Vendors with an eye on the temper of environmentally-aware customers are continuously browsing for means to cut down their carbon footprint – and paper consumption at the level of sale could well be an engaging location to focus on. Particularly specified that any financial savings in paper usage would not only support the setting but also support with price reductions for the retail store.
In this post we are quantifying the quantity of thermal paper that a regular 700 keep retail chain would use in a day and a year – and the affect that rationalizing paper use could possibly have on an organizations carbon footprint.
I chosen 700 stores as a base due to the fact in the current market I am observing – Australia – there are two significant players in the grocery store arena each with 700+ stores running.
In a usual grocery store in Australia a point of sale checkout lane will take in on ordinary 3.5 rolls of thermal paper for every working day. The body weight of a roll of thermal paper includes 333 grams of true paper. An ordinary supermarket will have at the very least 10 checkout lanes.
Carrying out the essential math the argument for paper saving results in being persuasive:
- 700 retail stores x 10 lanes for each keep = 7000 checkout lanes for that retail chain
- 7000 checkout lanes x 3.5 rolls of thermal paper for every working day = 24,500 rolls of paper/day.
- 24,500 rolls of paper x 333 grams/roll = 8,158,500 grams in whole, which equates to 8.1585 tonnes of paper for each working day.
This appears like a great deal of paper – and yes it is! It requires somewhere around 22 trees to make a solitary tonne of thermal paper. So in our 700 retailer state of affairs above, exactly where the retail chain consumes on common additional than 8 tonnes of paper each and every working day of procedure this equates to:
8.1585 tonnes of paper per day x 22 trees for each tonne = 179 trees for each working day
Most supermarkets are in small business for at the very least 360 times of a specified calendar year and this everyday tree use definitely blows out when you extrapolate these figures, mainly because the selection of trees eaten every year all of a sudden leaps to –
179 trees eaten per working day x 360 times running = 64,440 trees for every yr!
If a greentailing small business ended up in a position to lessen their paper consumption by 50% they would be preserving 32,000 trees every yr – 320,000 trees in a ten years.
Multiply this quantity by how many retail chains are out there and we are talking virtually thousands and thousands of mature trees which to day are proving to be the greatest carbon sucking system readily available on the world.
Can greentailers make a distinction by lowering paper intake?
Positive they can – a new breed of eco-friendly pos printer know-how, or eco printers, is out there that can make a 50% paper conserving achievable. The query now is do greentailers have the want to adhere to via.
