Smaller backpack, bigger impact

The alarm blares at 7:00 am telling me it’s time to get up and get moving. My thought process for the first two months of school went something like this… shower, brush teeth, clothes, pack bag. With packing my bag I mentally noted each notebook and binder for all the classes I had for the day, along with my wallet, keys, headphones, and pens. My sleepy brain planned ahead for the day, knowing I wouldn’t be back to my room until one or possibly two in the afternoon.

This silly method became a routine and my sleepy brain barely even had to think at all. Now, however in the third month of school, my sleepy brain has to adopt a new routine, and it is taking some time. Day one of the challenge, I brought my laptop in the morning, but not papers of assignment descriptions from different teachers. The second day I forgot to charge my laptop the night before and was forced to use paper for taking notes, due to the dead battery.

I’ve been forced to train my sleepy brain in a new way. Instead of thinking in terms of notebooks, binders, and pens, I think in terms of laptop, class assignments on paper, and battery life.

There is a silver lining to packing my back pack differently… It weighs less and one laptop takes up about a quarter of the space of all the notebooks I used to pack. The convenience of a smaller back, while making a big impact is a great benefit to the challenge.

Along with observing some of the new challenges, I took a look into how exactly cutting down on paper impacts my own footprint on the earth. I found an academic article in which the impact of recycling paper has been researched, I took note because I plan on recycling all of the printed out readings that have already been sacrificed. The article showed in the Netherlands where the paper recycling rate is 75% 1 ton of CO2 emissions is saved (Laurijssen, 2010). If just recycling paper, but still using it saves that much CO2 I can only imagine what my impact on CO2 emissions will be.

Let’s hope my new adopted morning mantra will stick with me and allow me to keep with this challenge for the next five weeks!

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