The false dilemma is: “By using paper to print your email or by receiving paper bills you are knowingly degrading the environment, destroying forests and/or killing trees.”
The forced choice is: “Eliminate your use of paper or feel like a guilty hypocrite.”
In his newest report, Print vs. Digital Media: False Dilemmas and Forced Choices(download the PDF here), Don Carli, Senior Research Fellow at The Institute for Sustainable Communication, takes a clear-eyed look at organizations’ insistence that we choose between print and digital media.
Public opinion polls show that concern about the environment rises and falls based on the state of the economy, but concern about the negative impacts associated with using paper and printing continues to rise. Nothing captures the essence of these feelings more vividly than the signature line appearing at the foot of more and more emails: “Please consider the environment before printing this email.”
read full article at:
