The green buzz is out there, and it’s not going away. Twenty plus years ago we saw a huge surge in the market for recycled papers. Almost as quickly as it began, it dissipated, because at the time, the paper industry wasn’t prepared. You had to pay a premium for an inferior product. But fear not, the market has spoken, and the paper industry has responded. Here are some tips to help you take steps toward greener pastures.

1. Request certified paper sources — The two most prevalent forestry certification organizations in the U.S. are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). The purpose of these two organizations is to make sure the harvesting of trees and management of forests is done in environmentally and socially responsible ways. Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.

Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.

Each organization has a chain-of-custody (CoC) certification that tracks the raw materials from the certified lands, to the paper manufacturer, to the paper merchant, and finally to the printer — all of which must have CoC certification. By maintaining this chain, we are able to place an FSC or SFI logo on your print materials. So, not only are you making an environmentally responsible choice, you’re also letting your constituents know it.

2. Check the recycled content — It’s important to note that not all FSC-certified or SFI-certified papers are recycled. Within each certification type, there are papers ranging anywhere from virgin paper (no recycled content) to 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) recycled content. Many coated papers (such as gloss, dull, or matte) are 10% PCW; some paper stocks contain as much as 30% PCW (very few coated papers carry a recycled content above 30%). There are quite a few uncoated papers available with 100% PCW recycled content. Be sure to specify if you want to print your marketing materials on recycled paper in addition to using FSC- or SFI-certified papers.

3. Compare costs — Not all recycled paper is more expensive than non-recycled paper. Recycled papers are getting more and more competitive with their virgin counterparts. One hundred percent PCW papers can be as much as 10% higher in cost. On the other hand, some of the 10-30% PCW papers are comparable in price with non-recycled equivalents.

4. Look for quality – Recycled paper quality has improved greatly over the last decade. It’s a common misconception that recycled papers are discolored, rough, or flecked with colored fragments, but this is no longer the case. Both the appearance and printability of recycled papers are now on par with most virgin papers. In fact, it’s hard — if not impossible in some cases — to tell the difference when comparing paper swatches or print samples.

There are also a few paper mills making even greener strides by manufacturing papers using hydroelectric-generated power or wind power. Mohawk Paper has an environmental calculator to help you quantify the environmental impact of going green on your next printing project.

More on certification: To FSC or SFI? That is the question.

A report just released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows the age of Internet users is rising, with Generation X’ers leading when it comes to online banking, shopping, and researching health information, and the percentage of users from 70-75 years old showing the biggest increase (up from 26% of that age group going online in 2005 to 45% currently).

While middle-aged Gen X’ers and older users approach the Internet as a tool, younger users (teens and Gen Y’ers) see it more as a source of entertainment.  Among users 12-17 years old:

• 78% play online games
• 57% watch videos online
• 69% send instant messages
• 65% use social networking sites
• 59% download music
• 55% have created a profile on a social networking site
• 49% read blogs
• 28% have created their own blog
• 10% visit a virtual world

Access to the full report is here.

Need more evidence that Facebook is no longer the province of teens?  Here are the latest user statistics from Inside Facebook:

The big news?  Only 12% of registered users are between 13 and 17 years old.

Other highlights:

• Nearly 25% of all Facebook users are over 35.
• 45% of users are 26 years old or older, which is where FB continues to expand. The fastest growing age group by total users is 26-34.
• The number of female users aged 55 and over grew 175.3 percent since late September making them the fastest growing segment.  Males in that age group grew by 137.8%.  (This age group still accounts for only 3% of all users.)
• Overall, more women than men are registering in almost every age group. Women now comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience and outnumber men in the 18-25 and 26-34 age groups.  Those groups have 1.4 females for every 1 male user.

Is FB running its course as the go-to site for prospective students?  Or is it a big enough tent that teens will tolerate some crowding by those they consider old folks (meaning, of course, everyone over 35)?

Laurent Haug recalls Clay Shirky’s interview with CJR back in December where he gave a cogent response to the criticisms of the Web’s effects on culture and attention span.  Haug cites one passage that didn’t jump out at me at the time but that is worth keeping in mind:

[I]t’s not just when a tool comes along that change happens. It’s really when it becomes ubiquitous and even boring. And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.

Haug has himself raised the issue of the boringness of the Web previously.  Both are useful reminders that digital technology and interactivity are just part of the furniture for prospective students.

And since Haug sent me back to reread Shirky’s interview, I’ll share Shirky’s take on why information overload is a generational phenomenon:

[Y]ou know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

…

I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Stanley Fish reviews The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University by Frank Donoghue.  According to Donoghue, the time of the traditional, liberal arts institution is over.

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

The “ethic of productivity” has overtaken the ethic of contemplation. We already see this in the operations of liberal arts institutions: “in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.”  These schools market themselves as bastions of thoughtful examination, but internal discussions are about customer service, maximizing efficiencies, and minimizing costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the for-profit university, which explicitly rejects talk about the life of the mind, is gaining influence and redefining the liberal arts model as a luxury.  (Just look at Kaplan’s new ad.)  Learning should be a means to an end, and teaching about imparting instrumental knowledge, not inspiring appreciation.  Consequently, according to Donoghue, “ ‘all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.’ And as a corollary ‘professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.’ ”

The current recession, assuming it’s as long and as deep as some economists predict, will exacerbate these tensions and accelerate these trends.  Students–adult learners and traditional undergraduates–will demand more concrete, practical, and immediate payoffs for their investment.  (And, as we’ve seen with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix recently, those corporations recognize that their moment has come.)  This means traditional liberal arts institutions will face even harder choices in the future, and passivity today will only further weaken their perceptions in the market.  For institutions that talk about the virtues of self-examination, now is the time to put those reflective abilities into practice.

This appeared in the Boston Globe on Christmas Day, so in case you missed it: Facing rising tuition here at home and more purchasing power in Canada, greater numbers of New England students are heading north of the border for college.

Colleges in eastern Canada report mounting interest this fall among high school seniors from the Northeast, with a recently stronger US dollar making already low tuition costs even more of a bargain for Americans.

Although applications for next academic year are not due for at least a month, schools from Toronto to Halifax say many students in the Boston area and throughout the region are drawn by the allure of an international college experience relatively close to home.

…

The number of Americans studying abroad has more than doubled in the past decade, and high school counselors say the influx to Canada reflects a broader trend of students attending foreign universities full time.

Since 2001, the number of American attending college in Canada has risen by 50 percent to about 9,000, according to Canadian Embassy in Washington.

Now, 9,000 students isn’t a huge number, and the recruiting efforts appear to be confined to New England, but it’s a trend worth watching. US schools appear to be behind the 8-ball on this one: Canadian colleges are heavily subsidized, making them less expensive than private schools in the US and in some cases comparable to public institutions. Add to that a simplified admissions process, schools with outstanding reputations, and (at least in the case of Toronto) fabulous urban experiences. Oh, and while they don’t qualify for financial aid, US students can receive loans from the federal government (that is, our federal government) to study in Canada.

I’m curious, though: Does anyone know the number of Canadian students studying in the US?

The full story is here.