Suren Cooke Agencies Strives to Achieve Paperless Business Communication

The consumption of paper and cardboard went from 392.7 million metric tons globally in 2008 to 422 million metric tons in 2018 according to https://www.statista.com. Producing 1 kilo of paper requires 2-3 times its weight in trees. Which means in 2018 1,055 billion kilos of trees were destroyed to meet the demand of paper and cardboard.

The most commonly used softwood trees for papermaking include spruce, pine, fir, larch and hemlock, and hardwoods such as eucalyptus, aspen and birch. The average weight of an 80-foot hardwood tree with a 24-inch diameter can weigh about 9072kg’s meaning in 2018 approximately 116,291,887 trees were destroyed to meet the global demand of paper and cardboard assuming the full tree is used. If not, many more trees will have been destroyed.

420 million tons of paper corresponds to two pieces of paper for everyone on Earth every single hour. The rate of current consumption is such that if everyone used 200 kilos of paper per year there would be no trees left. The demand for paper is expected to double between 2005 and 2030. Paper producers usually source their trees from commercial forests. A commercial forest in brazil requires at least 7 years to grow a tree dense enough for paper manufacturing./p>

Sri Lanka Imports paper and paperboard, articles of pulp, paper and board that cost us US$473.17 Million in 2017, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade which works out to about 118.29 million kg of paper consumed by Sri Lankans in 2017.

Producing 100,000 sheets of paper from new sources requires over 8 trees and almost 2,000kWh of energy. It has a carbon footprint of 6,000kg. A carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide—released into the atmosphere by a particular human activity. Further, it takes 10 litres of water to produce a single A4-sheet of paper. The pulp and paper industry is the single largest industrial consumer of water in Western countries.

It’s apparent that paper production is extremely costly in terms of global resources, and for Sri Lankans, in national wealth. It’s past time we embraced a paperless lifestyle to help reduce our carbon footprint to save our planet from global warming.

This is why The Suren Cooke Agencies issues electronic quotations so we may abide by our policy on reducing our carbon footprint—"Improve the quality of life by effective management of pests using organic and eco-friendly means without undue harm to consumers and the environment". Our entire quotation process is digitized and all documents that must be printed are done so on, used and internally recycled paper.

Business communication is one of the largest drivers of demand for the consumption of paper. We want to lead by example by reducing our paper consumption as much as possible and we like to provide our clients with the opportunity to reduce their paper consumption anyway we can by digitizing paper-based processes like issuing quotations. In nearly all cases, the evolution from paper-based items to their electronic counterparts is profoundly more efficient.

The benefits of paperless business communication are:

• Saves Time
• Saves Space
• Saves Money
• Eases Transfer of Information
• Promotes the Environment
• Boosts Security

Suren Cooke Agencies has had a long standing focus on being as environmentally friendly as possible. The latest move in that regard is our state-of-the-art, carbon neutral facility and we take pride in neutralising most of our organisations’ carbon emission by our recycling initiative rather than by buying Carbon Credits. We use a non-chemical alternative for Termites Control called Xterm and we manufacture our rodent bait stations using recycled plastic, obtained from our surroundings and our oceans. We also upcycle plastic gathered from our “Save our Seas (SOS)” projects and through the Earthly Warrior initiative.