Have you hugged a tree today?

I'm becoming more and more aware of how wasteful our society is with materials. I try my hardest to not only recycle everything that I can, but also purchase items that use less packaging or packaging that is recyclable.

At work today I had a few hours to kill before the store opened, so I went through and cleaned out the old forms, invoices, brochures, and other promotional crap that we had laying around. It was all expired so I started piling it up to take it back to the recycling box for paper that we finally have in. I quickly realized I was going to need a shopping cart to hold it all and by the time I was done, the cart was half full of paper. I was glad that we now have our paper recycled but still kind of bummed me out a bit that so much paper was created, never used, and had to be recycled into something else.

Even though all this paper will be recycled, it is still incredibly wasteful. The process to both create and recycle paper consumes quite a bit of other resources like water and wood, and to create paper can sometimes require harmful chemicals. You would think working for Best Buy's Geek Squad, a very high tech company, we could figure out a way to not need to use so much paper, but apparently it is the opposite.