On any college campus, you’re undoubtedly going to go through a lot of paper–apparently 180,000 sheets at Simpson.

With the introduction of a new monitoring system, Simpson’s Information Services has been able to track how many sheets each person is using. The monitoring system isn’t a bad idea. It’s shed some light on many students who may be taking advantage of the free paper. The system may not be fair, though.

Who hasn’t seen an open computer that someone forgot to log-off of and had a heyday printing a 30-page journal? Our bets are on the English and history majors, turning in paper after paper week after week. Either way, 40 students have printed an excess of 2,000 sheets of paper.

For now, the solution to our large paper consumption has turned to printing on both sides of the paper. Not a bad idea. That turns consumption into half the volume of printed pages.

We’re not too excited about the whole “you have a certain amount of pages you can print” idea, though. Maybe those 40 of us really did need those 2,000 pages.

More and more professors are sending syllabi, readings and assignments through email. Maybe the professors are just trying to save themselves in the war of paper consumption-make the students print.

The paper usage may seem a bit out of control at the moment, but hopefully some benefits will come from the double-sided printing. After all, it’s not as though paper grows on trees.