If you look around the room where you are sitting and reading this, the one thing that you are most likely to find and in great amounts is paper. From posters on the wall to that little chit in your left pocket, from newspapers and magazines to the tags on your cupboard, we use paper way more than we think we do, and it is about time we realise what exactly happens when we roll up a piece of paper and chuck it in the bin.

Did you know that approximately 324 litres of water, which is becoming scarce by the day thanks to global warming, is used to produce only one kilogramme of paper? Let's not even start counting the trees. If that doesn't scare you enough, get this A good 10,000 trees are cut down annually in South Asia only to make holiday cards. In the United States, it takes 75,000 trees to print only the 'Sunday Edition' of the New York Times over a weekend. Also, more than a 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail.

Considering the fact that every tree provides oxygen enough for three people to breathe, one does wonder what sort of future we are planning for ourselves. In the past one decade, Asia has surpassed Western Europe in paper consumption and will soon surpass the United States, which is estimated to use more than 25 per cent of all the paper in the world annually. What's even more horrifying is that it is estimated that paper consumption will rise by 50 per cent by next year.

Paper usage is rising by around 20 per cent every year, with the average school-going child using approximately 50 sheets of paper every day. And not just that, 115 billion sheets of paper are used annually for personal computers.

 
These are only a few reasons why we need to practise conservative paper use. The real picture is way scarier than anyone can imagine. Did you know that every ton of recycled paper can save up to 17 trees, which implies that recycling half the world's paper would free 20 million acres of forestland? Well, you do now and it is time to do something about it.