Staple-less future?

[the.fee.fairy]

Anyone with me on trying to get the use of staples greatly reduced? This afternoon i have picked out a total of 104 staples from pieces of paper. Some of these bits had 6/7 staples for 4 pieces of paper!!

I have very loudly complained about the staples, only to have people give me the 'don't worry, she's just the odd one' look.

I hate staples...with a passion!

[Andy Hamilton]

Anyone with me on trying to get the use of staples greatly reduced? This afternoon i have picked out a total of 104 staples from pieces of paper. Some of these bits had 6/7 staples for 4 pieces of paper!!

I have very loudly complained about the staples, only to have people give me the 'don't worry, she's just the odd one' look.

I hate staples...with a passion!

why not approach your boss and tell them that you can save the office money. then show them thestapless stapler. or even just try to introduce paper clips!

[the.fee.fairy]

i'm trying with the paper clips, but the other day a woman i work with went through all ym papers (i do phoning people who haven't filled in forms properly) and stapled them..to help me...

ARGH

I have requested that no-one give me any forms with staples on them, as i will take them out and throw them at people...

[Muddypause]

What actually is the issue here? Energy? Resources? Cost? Personal dislike?

I'm not aware that staples on their own are making any significant contribution to our demise.

[the.fee.fairy]

there is the fact that staples are generally a great loss of energy and resources.

Personally, i hate them because they're a pain in the backside to get out of pieces of paper cleanly, and they're so unneeded here.

Andy had a fact somewhere that if every office worker in britain used one less staple a day, it would save 300,000 tonnes (i think...please correct me) of steel a year. Imagine the energy that would save in making staples...and carting them round the country, only for them to hold a couple of bitos of paper together, then get taken out and thrown away. They're not reusable!

so, although they don't directly cause climate change, or any of the earth's major poblems, they do help. And, imagine all those tonnes of steel going into landfill every day...staples don't generally get recycled.

Oooh...that's an idea...does anyone know anywhere that will recycle them? I'll happily have a bin on my desk to put them in to save them :)

[red]

why not approach your boss and tell them that you can save the office money. then show them thestapless stapler. or even just try to introduce paper clips!

I have one of these - I work from home. they don't do the job as well as a proper stapler... so now i just staple the things that really must stay together. Difficult to imagine that the energy used to make this device will be recovered very soon......

[the.fee.fairy]

i tried a stapless stapler at BGG. It was rather neat.

It would work fine here, because apart from the large batches, there's only ever 4/5 pieces of paper at the most to clip together. The large batches are about 50 pages, and i'm not sure what the answer is for those yet.

Just got to convince the boss to allow for stapless staples in the budget for stationery...

[Muddypause]

there is the fact that staples are generally a great loss of energy and resources.[..]
Andy had a fact somewhere that if every office worker in britain used one less staple a day, it would save 300,000 tonnes (i think...please correct me) of steel a year.

Don't mind me being a leeetle bit sceptical of that factlet, but you know how much I love this kind of thing.

I've just weighed the contents of a new packet of 2000 size 26/6 (proper sized ones) staples on me kitchen scales: 30 grams. That means, conveniently, that there are twenty trillion (20,000,000,000,000) staples in 300,000 tonnes.

If we guess that there are 15 million office workers in the UK, all of whom have access to a stapler and know how to use it, and ignoring holidays, and sickies, that is over 5,000 staples per office worker per workday that they would have to cut down on in order to save that much steel.

Saving waste is to be applauded, but I also think we should keep a perspective of things, and not feel we have to look for a solution to something that is not really a problem.

[the.fee.fairy]

i might have got the figure wrong...

i just read the local council's recycling guide for offices and it says 72 tonnes, so it might be that instead. Don't know where the 300,000 came from

That's still a lot of metal going into landfill!

[Andy Hamilton]

ah so the front end of the site still does get read, even if it gets forgotten or wildley exagerated.

The actualy quote I think you are looking for is Stop using staples - according to Friends of the Earth "if every one of the UK's 10 million office workers used one less staple we would save 120 tonnes of steel a year".

[Muddypause]

'ang on, let me do the maths... subract 5... dot and carry one... divide by the number you first thought of...

Ah, yes, 72 tonnes is actually about right (slightly high if my staples are typical - but hey, my kitchen scales are not noted for their benchmark accuracy).

But don't stop me yet...

...specific density of steel is around 7,850kg per cubic meter, so that's a little under 10 cubic meters.

...from Wikipedia, annual world steel production is around 1,100,000,000 tonnes. So one staple per day per office worker in the UK would represent around .0000065% of that.

Actually, I have to concede that that is rather more than I thought it would be.

Ah, now I see Andy's introduced more figures... wait...wait...

Hmm... 10 million people saving one staple a day = 120 tonnes... Well it's not wildley out, but it would mean that an average office staple would weight 3 times what my staples do. I get 60 tonnes.

[Andy Hamilton]

Are the freinds of the earth working out their stats as every office worker working every day thus your calculations would be out by 2/7ths?

[Muddypause]

No, that would mean they are wrong. I mean office workers don't work 7 days a week, do they?

One staple a day = 5 per week. To base your figures on 7 per week would be misrepresenting the facts, wouldn't it?

I was an office worker once, for 6 months (worst job I ever had. Whenever I'm working outside and it's wet and cold, I remember that miserable desk-bound job and suddenly I feel good about things again). But I don't remember using a single staple in that time, so I wouldn't have been able to save one staple per day - so maybe the 10 million figure is bogus, too.

[Andy Hamilton]

true, true.

I once had a job where I did nothing but staple for 2 days. That would have made up for 100's if not thousands of other people. that was about 15 hours of nothing but stapling. I can;'t remember but I think that was one of the jobs I got sacked from as they thought I did not seem commited enough.

[den_the_cat]

true, true.

I once had a job where I did nothing but staple for 2 days. That would have made up for 100's if not thousands of other people. that was about 15 hours of nothing but stapling. I can;'t remember but I think that was one of the jobs I got sacked from as they thought I did not seem commited enough.

just random stapling? Patterns in paper? How on earth can any place generate that much 'needing to be connected togeter' paper?!

Of course if we got rid of staples it would also mean we could get rid of staplers, which, as well as using energy plastic and metal, in my experience break at a rate of about 1 per month per office worker so they must contribute quite considerably to landfill and waste :)