Opinions

Op-ed by Soren Larson: Students should pay for their paper

In print | April 2, 2009

For a bunch of tree huggers, we sure use a lot of paper. Lisa Brunner Bireley of ITS said on Monday that ITS has purchased 1.78 million pages of paper for library use thus far this school year, and ITS might have to buy more. Paper consumption is out of control here and it doesn’t seem like the Green March initiative will change much. Unfortunately, our printing privileges are the problem.
By making printing free on campus, the college implicitly tells students that paper has no value and that treating it like it has no value isn’t bad. Accordingly, students print excessively and have few qualms about not collecting their printouts. But who cares — paper is worthless, right? To reduce paper consumption on campus, the college should charge students some penalty for printing excessively.

While we all appreciate free printing, few of us appreciate its costs. Free printing changes student consumption behavior by distorting the true costs of products we consume. Instead of buying a used textbook online, I’ll download a free or heavily discounted version and print it for free. I don’t want to buy paper fill, so I’ll just use the free paper the college offers us. By giving away printing products, the college generates artificially high consumption, which siphons funds from valuable programs.
It gets worse. In addition to the college creating incentives for students to consume unnecessarily, students have no compelling reason to conserve. We recognize that waste is bad, but the consequences of our excessive paper consumption aren’t clear.

Students need a direct incentive to save paper — students need to pay for it. I propose a point-based system that allocates some number of pages based on a formula that should account for class load, paper demands of certain academic areas and W-course designation. Any printing beyond this amount should add some fee to student library accounts (say five cents), which, after students have passed some threshold, should restrict or limit borrowing until students pay librarians, who can re-enable students’ accounts. The system must include some leeway, so I propose if students or professors find the predetermined printout allocation to be inadequate, they fill out an application that should require students and/or professors to explain why they need more paper. This application process should be bothersome enough to discourage all but the most legitimately paper-hungry students from applying. The college should not be lenient about this additional process.

Groups might also need printing privileges, which they can attain via some application process. To reduce the time students spend printing materials and the number of pages left unclaimed at printers, professors should print and bind reading materials before semesters begin and sell such pamphlets in the bookstore for the price of the pamphlets’ production. This will reduce student printing in general, assign real value to the paper products we consume and simplify my plan.
If this isn’t appealing, there is another, though less effective solution. Given the college’s Quaker heritage, Swarthmore may want to continue to give students unlimited printing privileges. In this case, the college should aim to reduce the paper students print but never pick up. It could do so by requiring students to, after having sent their desired documents to the printer, sign in at computers stationed by printers to command printers to actually print their documents. In this scenario, printers will only print documents relayed from adjacent computers. This solution seems the best because printing remains free and we diminish unclaimed, wasted paper at printers. But this system imposes costs as well. Instead of paying monetarily, students must pay with their time. Given the lines that will undoubtedly form at these relay computers, this time will be considerable. But with time’s opportunity cost varying widely among students, this solution isn’t perfect because some students would be better off by paying for printing with cash and using their time for other things.

All students should have access to the same resources on campus, but current paper usage policy isn’t forcing students to internalize their consumption and waste. I doubt this idea will be popular, but far too many of our actions carry costs that don’t appear in current pricing structures. Global warming just might be the consequence of such a phenomenon. As famous economist Ronald Coase argued, society can resolve externalities by inserting them into the market. In our process of learning, wasted paper is a negative externality whose cost we, as students, don’t internalize. However, if the college demands students pay for paper — even if no money is exchanged — we will see a dramatic reduction in paper consumption.