William & Mary switches to recycled paper
Recycled Paper Susie Gilligan, central copy manager, loads some recycled paper into a copy machine in the office of procurement. William & Mary will now use a 75% recycled content paper for general purpose copying and printing.
William & Mary's Office of Procurement, in collaboration with the Committee on Sustainability, announces that it has changed the College's preferred type of general purpose copier/printer paper from a virgin 0% recycled option to a 75% recycled content paper.
The new type of paper, recycled Navigator, is acid-free and has 35% post-consumer recycled content. The sustainability committee - a group of faculty, staff and students appointed last semester by William & Mary President Taylor Reveley - is part of the College's campus-wide green initiative. The switch to recycled paper will occur across campus as departments begin replacing their supplies. Some departments already use the recycled paper.
"It performs excellently in College printers and copiers, and offers a cheaper option than other recycled options that some College units have been using," said Lynda Butler, co-chair of the Committee on Sustainability and interim dean of the William & Mary Law School. "Switching the College to this new recycled paper will reduce William & Mary's carbon footprint by approximately 90 tons of CO2 emissions annually. This is equivalent to taking 20-30 cars off the road."
The proposal to change the preferred paper type for the College arose from the Committee on Sustainability's ongoing efforts to understand and reduce the total greenhouse gas emissions of William & Mary. For more information on the sustainability committee, visit their Web site at www.wm.edu/sustainability.
