Paperless Day History
Where it all began...
It all began for the first time in the year 2008 when
the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD) collaborated with ADGAS
to commemorate "World Environment Day" under the theme "CO2:
Kick the Habit".
Since the day was a great success we took things a notch
higher and in 2009 we had 12 organizations on board with us.We
achieved a greater reduction in paper and generated more awareness
about this issue within Abu Dhabi.
In 2010, the initiative was even more succesful with over 200
organisations taking part.
This year we want to take this project forward nationally and we
hope to achieve a far higher target in terms of carbon
emissions avoided and paper reduced.
How it happened...
While the world was happy going around planting trees in
semi-arid and arid areas we reminded them that planting trees here
in the UAE could pose serious issues for water scarcity.
Thus the question became that as a corporate entity what could
we do through the individual or company level to kick the CO2 habit
apart from planting trees.
We realized that as a government entity energy is one of
our primary concerns and energy issues are key issues of
governance. We thought of simple steps like switching the lights
off being careful about the little things. But these steps however
did not make major reductions in energy consumption.
Thus the idea emerged that paper was the ideal option to focus
on for generating measurable reductions in carbon emissions.
Although recycling became the mantra, it wasn't enough. Recycling,
too uses a lot of energy and very often in recycling we fail
to close the loop in the lifecycle of the materials used in the
paper production process.
In fact it was discovered that all those companies and
organizations who believed that they were doing well in their
offices by recycling actually used more paper each year.
This was how all of us came to the conclusion that the focus
must be on LESS paper. To only use what we needed to and to start
restraining ourselves when it came to paper consumption. The
logical conclusion driven as a result was to have a Paperless
Day.