Kaagaz: A Bold New Innovation to Save Paper and Trees
By the time you finish reading this post, more than 199 tons of paper will have been produced. About 3,068,381 trees will already have been chopped down for those sheets. And since making each kilogram of paper requires a whopping 324 liters of water – 58,479,732 liters will have been soaked up by the very same paper.
42% of all global wood harvest is eaten up by our paper needs. Is this easily replaceable commodity really what we want to spend our forest resources on, seeing as now we have plentiful technological alternatives?
Maybe, we do want that. Because even though a reduction in paper usage was predicted due to the electronic revolution, that never actually happened. In fact, the demand for paper is expected to double by 2030. People simply don’t want to stop using paper.
Why? Because most of us have this nostalgic obsession with the scent, texture, feel of paper. We wax poetic about the smell of old books, and shrink back in horror at the mere suggestion of reading ebooks. We truly need to get over this fixation and shift our focus on something much more pressing and significant – Our Planet.
Thinking on these lines, Kaagaz – one of the most ingenious substitutes for this timber nightmare was launched in January 2016 by the Lazy Eight Labs. A light, sharable piece of paper on the cloud that also supports multiple vernaculars, Kaagaz is an environmentalist’s shiniest daydream come to life.
This brilliant piece of technology enables you to type anything you may wish to on a virtual paper – a Kaagaz. You can edit and reedit it, share your bit link with others, or even hide your Kaagaz so it’s completely untraceable without a special password. And with its easy, clean, totally beautiful interface, this website does seem like the much needed new age version of paper.
You don’t even need to log in or download an application, it’s just as easy as using actual paper (without the colossal damage to the Earth, of course). So, if there’s something you want to come back to, you can save the link. If you want to trash it, you only have to open up another Kaagaz. The concept is based on that of an author using a typewriter, the pieces of paper she’s happy with are kept, and the others are tossed straight into the bin!
Wonderful News: Kaagaz is free and is going to be free forever. More Wonderful News: In mere weeks after its launch, 2489 Kaagaz have already been generated. These numbers show that perhaps, we are finally starting to see the picture of the ongoing environmental crisis clearly.
We sure hope so.
Image by CollegeDegree360 over Creative Commons
Its fun..I am keeping my notes online!
As much as we all’d like to hope, the state of denial around the climate crisis is bigger in our nation than anywhere else.
Yeah_the nostalgia part is on point. That’s really why most people insist on using paper.
It’s really great that someone finally pointed out that electronic storage isn’t really an option anymore and we have great a alternative then the whole “feel” of writing !
Nice! Gonna try using it!
Thanks for the great write up !