Everyday hundreds of pencils are lost forever. They fall under cabinets, in trash cans and anywhere else you can’t reach. However, there is a solution. Stealing. If everyone steals pencils then less pencils will be wasted.

Throughout the past 24 hours I have saved 15 pencils from being lost to the aether using the simple strategy of theft. Every time someone leaves a pencil unattended, I take it. Some people may complain saying that stealing is wrong however that is explicitly wrong.

For a first point, who else is going to use those pencils? If someone doesn’t steal them they are just going to be left lying around. Every year the average student goes through 28-35 pencils a year with 82,000 trees being cut down every year to make them. Considering that every tree absorbs between 10 and 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide every year, this means that just to make extra pencils, 3,280,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide are left floating in our atmosphere.

Based on these statistics buying more pencils should not be something that you ever do. Everytime you buy a pencil you are putting money towards the destruction of trees. If you didn’t buy pencils and instead stole them from other people you could manage to reduce your carbon footprint with incredibly minimal effort. I am a staunch supporter of having this planet survive for the next twenty years so thus I will continue to steal pencils and save the world!

Now, I bet you’re wondering about the ethics of stealing from other classmates. Certainly if you have to hurt someone else to help yourself that is immoral? No, you see according to the United States Constitution, the only way to get a civil trial is if your damages are valued at at least $20. The average pencil only costs around 20 cents according to the United States Government you can steal 100 pencils fully guilt free.

More so on the moral aspect, based on the moral ideology of Pareto Efficiency, whenever you can make one party better off without making another party worse off, you should do so. Using this mentality we can see that the people who left their pencils behind are not benefiting from them anymore, and the odds that they will come back are negligible. You would be wasting resources and thus breaking the rules of Pareto Efficiency meaning morally, you should be stealing pencils.

So, next time you see a pencil lying around unattended, be sure to look left, look right, then grab it. Know that everytime you do, you are not only helping yourself but also the environment and the world around you.