Hooray for Earth Day! Today and every day we’re so grateful for the earth, its beauty and all of the resources it provides. Every April, the Edulastic Team makes a conscious effort to reflect and think about our impact on the environment.
As an education technology company that helps educators with online instruction, paper saving is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Edulastic’s impact on our earth. To understand this better, we calculated the number of pages saved by the entire Edulastic community in the past 12 months. We followed the same algorithm as we have in past; this means we assume ten questions per average sheet of paper. We are so excited to share this year’s awesome results. The 2022 stats are the most impressive and impactful as they’ve ever been!
Check it out below, and if you use Edulastic, thank you for contributing to such a great feat.
2021-2022 Paper Savings
How much paper has the Edulastic community saved this year?
To find our answer, we dove into Edulastic data. Dr. Lawrence Chernin, Senior Director of Data Science at Edulastic, calculated how many questions have been answered on Edulastic from April 2021 through March 2022. Drumroll please…. students have has answered 938,871,224 questions; and all we can say is WOW!
Using our algorithm of ~10 questions per sheet of paper, we calculated that 93,887,123 pages of paper have been saved in the past year by the Edulastic community. This is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating with your students and colleagues!
What does this mean?
To understand the impact of our paper saving on our earth, we turned to the Environmental Paper Network and their online paper calculator. With this, we can plug in our number of pages saved and calculate the impact this has on other resources as well, like energy, wood, CO2, and more.
93,887,123 pages of paper means that together we have saved:
- 3,740,000 pounds of wood, made from about 11,200 trees
- 12,000 million BTUs of energy, equivalent to 14,200 residential refrigerators operated/year
- 8,440,000 pounds of CO2e, equivalent to 766 cars/year
- 10,000,000 gallons of water, equivalent to 7,240 clothes washers operated/year
- 553,000 pounds of solid waste, equivalent to 126,000 people generating solid waste/day
- 175 acres of forest from being disturbed, that’s equivalent to the size of 132 football fields
You can check out the full report here.
Featured Earth Day Assessments for Your Class
We love working with and supporting educators who incorporate environmental and earth science curriculum into their classrooms. In fact, educators across the country and world have used Edulastic to create a plethora of free resources to help other educators teach all things earth science.
We’ve compiled a few featured assessments below, available to you for free in Edulastic. Assign them as is, or edit them to fit the exact needs of your students.
It’s amazing to look at the quantitative difference the Edulastic community has made over the past 12 months! If you use Edulastic with your students, thank you!
If you don’t currently use Edulastic but want to give it a whirl, you can create a free teacher account here. Trust us, you’ll save paper and time since Edulastic auto-grades for you, includes pre-made quizzes, tests, and lessons, and seamlessly syncs with Google Classroom.
From the Edulastic team to you, happy Earth Day! Let’s prioritize our planet today and every day.
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An additional note: When creating our Earth Day report, we would like to consider the impact of physical devices, such as servers and laptops, and the energy use associated with them. This is difficult to calculate and quantify, but incredibly important to keep in mind and remember. If anyone has a way to gather this data, please reach out. We’d love to hear from you as we are always trying to listen, improve, and grow as a company and as people.