IT and sustainable construction – 3

I spoke at yesterday’s  EMCBE Expo 2007 Construction Conference in Rockingham, Northamptonshire, on the theme of Sustainability: the IT contribution (see previous post).

Due to time constraints (more about that in a moment), I couldn’t use all the material I intended. I had brought with me a press cutting from Sunday’s Observer newspaper of this article: “Britain’s trillion-page mountain stacks up”, but it ended up staying in my briefcase. Useful quotes include:

  • Although an estimated 9 trillion pages a year are confined to computer screens, the number of printed pages stands at between 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide and is predicted to grow over the next 10 years.
  • office workers throw away 45 per cent of everything they print within a day
  • British offices print up to 120 billion pieces of paper every year, the equivalent of a paper mountain more than 8,000 miles high.

I’ve stored these quotes (electronically, of course) for future use.

I also learned a valuable lesson yesterday: try not to be the last speaker – especially if others are poor at keeping to their time slots. Despite the valiant efforts of conference chairman Andrew Carpenter (Constructing Excellence), the final group of speakers all had to shave five minutes off their allotted 20 minutes. And when one of these failed to do so, I ended up having to cram a 20 minute presentation into 10.

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