Voice
I have a busy life. Deadlines. Demands. Too much to do and too many things to remember. With all the places I have to be and things I need to do, why should I worry about garbage too?
 Narrator
The energy crisis, global warming, salmon recovery, clean air and clean water. Most of us care about these things. But the problems seem so big that it's hard for us to know what to do about them. It seems easier just to hope that someone, like the government or private industry or something, like a new technology, will take care of things for us.
But we are not powerless. Every day each of us makes decisions about how we use resources. We can choose to waste them or we can choose to use them wisely.
Garbage matters because it represents resources that are wasted. Take paper for example. Paper is the largest item in most office garbage. And transport packaging, including cardboard, is the largest item in some manufacturer's trash.
We take paper for granted but you might be surprised to learn what it takes to make paper. According to a recent study by Environmental Defense, producing a ton or 2,000 pounds of virgin copy paper requires 6,940 pounds of wood, 20,520 gallons of water and 38.4 million BTU's of energy and the manufacturing process produces tons of air and water pollutants and solid waste.
When we take steps to reduce our use of paper—be reformating documents, not printing our our email, copying on both sides of the paper, buying reuseable packaging and reducing the size and number of our forms, we save all those resources. And paper is only one of the many items we use and waste every day.
Voice
But I'm just one person. What I do doesn't matter.
Narrator
It's easy to think that individuals don't make a difference, but any marketing expert will tell you that individual choice does matter. That's why businesses spend so much money on advertising.
Individual choice works like a rain storm. Think about each choice you make as a raindrop. As each drop falls it joins other drops. Soon you have a trickle, then a stream and eventually a flood that can change the course of an entire river.
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