HS2 - Reams of Rubbish

The Daily Telegraph is carrying a story with this headline:

Two things immediately jump out here: we can work out how quickly we need to read each page, and we can work out the density of the paper involved.

The sub-heading says it “would weigh one tonne if it was (sic) printed out”.  This is because it was presented on a memory stick, which is significantly lighter, cheaper and easier than providing it in book form. 

Let's work out the density of the paper the campaigners intend to use.

One tonne = 1000kg = 1000000g

Divide by the number of pages to get 1000000g/50000pages = 20g per page.

Presumably it has been formatted to print on A4.  I know that A0 is 1m² of paper, so that means A1 is ½m²,  A2 is ¼m², A3 is one-eighth of a square metre and A4 is one-sixteenth of a square metre.

That gives the ‘weight’ of the paper that would be used to print this on as 20g x 16 = 320gsm.

The paper usually used in a photocopier is 80gsm, I think.  Card is 160gsm. 

320gsm seems rather heavy to me.

If we then revisit an earlier, unstated assumption, whereby I had assumed the document would be printed on a single side of the paper.  Surely some of the arguments against HS2 are environmental ones, so we would presumably want to print on both sides of the paper, meaning a 50,000-page document would need only (!) 25,000 pieces of paper. 

Let’s start a more sensible way around.  If the paper is 80gsm then a sheet of A4 (1/16 of a square metre) weighs 5g.  25,000 pieces of paper therefore weigh 125kg, which is sizeable but is a less impressive one-eighth of a tonne.

[The amount of reading is good.  Without any sleep I reckon you would need to read one page every 96 seconds to be able to get through it all.]

HS2 may well be A Bad Thing - I don’t know enough about it to be able to comment.  And giving people a 50,000-page document to read in under two months seems a little excessive (surely there is a summary?).   But overstating the size of the document by a factor of 8 doesn’t seem to help your cause.

Don’t do that.