Let me start this with a personal confession; I haven’t used printed users’ manuals in years. They still come with almost every product I buy and go straight into recycling.
Happily, it turns out that Internet users can opt-out of getting hard copies of users’ manuals for example go to the Techno Station a portal that is amassing all user manuals in one place.
All the environmental chatter is saying that doing searches can help save the environment. Surely the best thing all manufacturers and industrialists could do right now is to drastically slash the number of manuals printed on paper by asking exactly who requires them. My guess is that it would be a very small number of households who would still want user manuals in hard copies.
Statistics show that paper consumption has trebled during the last three decades, and given the present rate of growth, it is likely to double by 2010 that is a big cause of concern because it is linked with seismic environmental problems, from deforestation to industrial pollution to waste. Given my interest in the fast-degrading earth environment, I recommend that we all should reduce the use of words printed on paper. We can resort to reading online. Every bit can make a difference.
