The rituals of reading the newspaper are very rewarding - but killing trees just to do so? Not so much. With today’s technology, reading the newspaper doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be, well, paper. Consider scrapping the subscription to curl up with your laptop or mobile device to read today’s headlines. You’ll save anywhere from $30 - $200 / year in subscription fees and, if you can get a couple friends to do it as well, the amount of forest continuing its life will be vast. Put this into your head: 250 NY Times = 20 trees. Our friends at ZeroFootprint take the math further as they have found it takes about 3 trees a year sustain each person’s newspaper habits. Multiply this by 55 million - the amount of people in the US who read a newspaper daily– and you have yourself some serious clear cutting.

Feeling ambitious? Make your daily online reading easy by aggregating all your favorite paper’s headlines with an RSS reader like Windows Live or Netvibes. You’ll have all your headlines in one place and can scan quickly to get the news, without even touching a tree.

Photo by Jesse Hove