Shining Lotus has made the decision to convert their newsletter to an online edition only, and stop publishing a paper edition. The last paper edition will be April/May 2009, the next issue.
We put a lot of thought into this decision …
Let’s look at some statistics. The newsletter is 10 pages, that is five 8 ½” x 11” pages. We print 2,900 copies every other month. That’s 14,500 pages – 29 reams of paper – per issue, or 87,000 pages every year. We use 20# bond copy paper. One tree produces 8,333.3 sheets of copy paper. (Source: Conservatree.com). That means our store alone is killing 10.44 trees every year. So, we’ve killed over 100 trees in the last decade, just to send out a newsletter. And, sadly, all but a few of those newsletters ended up in landfills and incinerators ….
Studies show that people increasingly rely on email and the web for information. (Source: CNN.com). Here in Denver, we only have to think about the fate of the Rocky Mountain News to see the trend. ….
The high environmental costs of using paper, combined with a dramatic social trend away from using paper, convinced us that the paper format is obsolete, or nearly so …
So, one more paper edition, then we’ll convert to email only. You can continue to receive the newsletter, in electronic format. Send an email to info@shininglotus.com, and we’ll add you to the mailing list. We’ll also post class schedules and readers’ schedules on the web site, and we’ll make paper copies of those schedules available in the store ….
We know that many of you look forward to getting our newsletters. While it’s sad to see the end of a tradition, it gives us great pleasure to be able to make socially responsible decisions on behalf of our community.