A4 paper, the world's explorer.. Created 20 years ago2004-10-27 10:11:11 UTC by Peace and LOve

Well, it's been a long day, so here are some calculations to peruse..

The distance of the Earth's centre to the Equator (this figure can be called the radius) is 6378 km.

Times this figure by two and then by pi (where pi is 3.14) and we have the figure 40,074. That's the circumference of the planet.
Forty thousand and seventy four kilometers.

That's quite alot.

Or so you'd think.

The average piece of A4 paper is 29.5cm long, from top to bottom.

1 kilometer is 100,000cm.

I'll do the math; 40,074km times 100,000 leaves us with 4,007,400,000.
That's four billion, seven million and four hundred thousand centimetres.

Seeing as you obviously don't have the time to make the jump, I'll do it for you:

It would take 135,844,068 sheets of A4 paper laid length to length to go all the way around the world at the equator.

That's quite alot of sheets of paper, one hundred and thirty five million, eight jundred and forty four thousand and sixty eight sheets of A4.
I'd like to see that stacked up, but something tells me it wouldn't be as impressive as I first thought.

I decided to investigate further, and searched for the most average way that A4 paper is stored. My findings show that most A4 is kept (or comes in) bundles of 500 sheets, and that bundle is stored with 5 other bundles in a larger box. That's 2500 sheets per box.

135,844,068 divided by 2500 is 54,338 (rounded up), that's only fifty four thousand three hundred and thirty eight boxes of A4 paper needed to go around the world.

This struck me as a rather insignificant figure, consider the amount of wood we chop down in rainforests daily.

I decided to look further into this ever growing mystery..

We chop down 2.47 acres a second of tropical rainforest.
That's 78,000,000 acres a year, 78,000,000 acres is equal to 96 (rounded down) cubic kilometers.

Doesn't sound like much does it?

Just goes to show we need the paper.. what's a few thousand boxes of A4 paper between friends?

Looks like weunz gots ourselves a reader. Are yall wif me? weunz dont appreciate urine type roun' here, so I suggest yall leave buddy or else I'll git my shotgun. Ya reckon?

Do it again with A3 and i'm almost sevvy.

95414286 (rounded up) pieces of A3 paper laid length to length would be need to travel the equator.

Does that mean as we use paper, the world shrinks until we cut down more trees?

Essentially, it means we're all going to Hell in a handbasket.

And here I was looking forward to the annual tree-bashing

Well, satan LOves the trees, as they say in Norway..

KILL THE TREES!

WE NEED THE NECCISARY PAPER! HURRY!

ITS THE APOCOLYS!

/spelling ..

I use up on average 20 A4 boxes (containing 5x500 sheet reams) every week at work.

Just as I was typing that, a further 20 were brought up. Power to the paper!

You realise that in terms of paper usage, we are actually travelling around the world once every two or three months, not bad, and that's just our departments, what about the rest of teh world...

It's actually quite sad, I might cry..

"Cry me a river, build a bridge, get over it" as they say in teh USA

Scum that they are..