Drawing is a fun activity for both adults and children, and a great way to keep kids entertained at restaurants. But is all the waste of crayons and paper necessary? 

Mountain Burger decided to provide reusable tablets during your time at the restaurant so kids can stay entertained drawing and doodling. These can be used over again so everyone can have fun without creating paper waste and crayon waste. The tablets are LCD, 10-inch screens that have a button to erase drawings so you can draw and start over as many times as you’d like.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 67.4 million tons of paper and paperboard were found in municipal solid waste at 23.1 percent of total municipal solid waste generation. Nondurable goods made of paper (excluding newspapers) only had a recycling rate of 43.1 percent. For all paper and paperboard municipal solid waste generated in 2018, 17.2 million tons ended up in landfills, comprising 11.8 percent of all waste in landfills in 2018.

The State of the Global Paper Industry 2018 report found that the U.S. is among 26 countries that have more than double the global average of per capita paper consumption. For the U.S. that means 222 kg of paper per person per year is consumed according to a study in 2016. There were only five countries that consumed more paper than the U.S. The categories for global consumption were paper used for wrapping and packaging (the largest category), printing and writing, sanitary, newsprint, and others. 

While the largest category of paper consumption is not printing and writing, it was the second largest at 26% percent of paper consumption. The paper industry has environmental impacts from natural resource consumption such as deforestation and production of greenhouse gas emissions from resource extraction and processing to its end-of-life in landfills. Decreasing paper consumption is important to reduce unnecessary consumption of natural resources and the production of greenhouse gases. 

When you go to Mountain Burger and want your kids to have fun drawing and playing games, they can do so using a tablet without creating unnecessary paper and crayon waste. Though it isn’t something you might have thought of, it’s one of the many ways that Mountain Burger is working towards net-zero emissions.