Alex Fielding - Technology leader with vision for making the world paperless

How much junk mail do you get every day? You are not alone. Every house gets tons of daily mail that most people don’t even read; they just toss it in the trash. 

Now look around you ... can you identify all the things made with paper? You may not know it, but there’s much more than the literal paper products. A lot of other every-day products make use of paper, such as:

• Tissues & cardboard boxes

• Stereo speakers

• Electrical plugs

• Home insulation

• Sole inserts in tennis shoes

• and much more

About 300 million tons of paper is used worldwide each year. America, with just 5 percent of the entire world’s population, uses 30 percent of all the paper produced.

Many activists are fighting against cutting trees down to make paper, but only 28 percent of the wood generated in the U.S. is used to make paper, and many of those trees used are grown by tree farms that specifically plant trees for later use -- just like crops.

Therefore, trees aren’t really the problem; the problem, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):  paper mills are among the worst polluters, releasing millions of pounds of highly toxic chemicals into the air, such as chlorine dioxide, methanol, formaldehyde, toluene, and hydrochloric acid -- thereby polluting our air, water, and land during the papermaking process.

You would think with the internet and many things today being digitized, we would no longer have a need for using paper, but according to ecology.com paper consumption has grown by 400 percent in the last 40 years.

While this is a worldwide problem that should concern everyone, it seems there are only a handful of people actively fighting against this massive increase in paper consumption. One of them is Alex Fielding.