A remarkable way to declutter our homes and minds

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Reducing your carbon footprint goes hand in hand with you getting more organized

To their credit, many financial institutions and utilities are encouraging us to go paperless to cut down on waste but also on the heavy carbon footprint tied to paper usage.

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This is a good thing when one considers how much energy is required to produce paper in the first place. There’s the energy needed to cut down the tree, transport it to a pulp and paper mill, produce the paper, package and ship it to a store, pick it up at the store and recycle it. Or in the worst case scenario, there’s the  energy needed to take it to a landfill site where it ultimately decomposes.

According to my trusty ChatGPT assistant, when you factor all of those steps in, to produce and dispose of a box of paper (5,000 sheets) it requires 72.6 kWh of energy – enough to power the average home for a week.

Despite the efforts of our banks and billing companies, we’re still a long way from becoming a paperless society. And we won’t be going back to using such cloth products as diapers, serviettes or handkerchiefs any time soon.

As well, many of us still love writing or drawing on paper because the experience seems so much more natural than typing on a computer. Me included.

That said, recently I discovered that some products do a great job of replicating the writing experience, enabling you to significantly cut back on the need for the booklets, sheets of paper and files that accumulate in our homes over time.

My journey down the paperless path began after years of hoarding scraps of paper (e.g. on envelopes or blank sheets from monthly bills) that I’d proudly use to jot things down on instead of buying paper from the store.

Deluged with these scraps, I finally decided enough was enough and began researching viable digital paper alternatives out there, which led me to the discovery of a product aptly called reMarkable (www.remarkable.com).

reMarkable replicates the writing experience on a softly lit digital screen (in contrast to a computer’s blue screen) and using the stylus provided, enables you to create notes, images or hand written diagrams.

You can opt to use a thin, medium or thick script and choose from various writing tools, be it a ballpoint pen, pencil, highlighter and even a calligraphy pen. Varying colour choices are also provided.

Anything you write can then be converted into text and similarly, any drawings, graphs or other sources of visual inspiration you jot down can be digitized, stored, organized on the tablet or emailed.

The product comes so close to making you feel like you’re writing that you’ll be much more inclined to use it instead of opting for paper. In my case, I’ve stopped writing on paper altogether.

There’s another positive to using a product like this, which is, reduced screen time and more specifically blue screen time. Between phones and computers, the average North American devotes seven hours to screen time each day.

And according to the Ontario Psychological Association, extended screen times can negatively impact mental health in several ways, causing stress, anxiety, social and cognitive issues. It can even mess up your sleep.

A key feature of reMarkable is it uses a gentler, less invasive light (so no bluescreen), making it feel more like you’re writing on paper and without the eyestrain and fatigue associated with other electronic devices.

A recent study found that when participants used paper tablets such as reMarkable in place of a phone or computer, stress levels were reduced by 35 percent, the participants were 20 percent more focused and had a 25 percent spike in verbal and visual creativity.

Having written about technology going back to those distant floppy disk days, I’ve always been on the lookout for transformative products, particularly ones that enhance our quality of living.

In this instance, what a product like reMarkable does is force us to pay even closer attention not only to screen time but to how much more focussed and productive we can be when not using a phone or computer.

Other spinoff benefits of a product such as reMarkable include having a device on hand the family can share (e.g. kids can use it to draw for fun or art assignments) and that can be used for everything from meal planning to household checklists, all the while helping to declutter your home of excess paper, files and filing cabinets, not to mention the pencils, pens, highlighters an erasers that go hand in hand with using paper.

If we collectively use less paper, it can help us to get just a bit closer to that elusive Net Zero world we so desperately need in the fight against climate change.

Mark Wessel lives in Ridgeway Ont. and is a passionate advocate for living more sustainably at home and in the greater community. Visit www.markdouglaswessel.com.