Sometimes, when you’re researching something online, you miss something that is, in retrospect, obvious. When writing the article “Statistics 3: The Search for Statistics 2”, I missed a slight detail in one of the many sources I was reading. After publishing that previous article, I was searching some more and rereading articles I already read, and that’s when I noticed it. I now noticed that some of the text in an article (Narain, 2022) I was reading was blue, indicating a link to another article. I followed the link to see if there was any new insight to be found.

This previously unknown article (thinkspace, 2008) casually stated that yet another article said that “every year a billion whiteboard markers are thrown into landfills in North America alone. School teachers use about 500 million whiteboard markers each year.” I’m intrigued by this new statistic and the precision in its wording. Seeing the clarification of the details about this statistic and the associated statistic makes it sound more reliable than everything else I’ve seen so far, but I still need a primary source to be sure. I still don’t know how these numbers were found. I need to keep looking.

I went to the next article (Whiteboard Markers, 2008) to double check that it said what the other article said it said. It did, but it also had no explanation of how the author got that number. This article instead said to go to the Eco Smart World website to “find out more”.

Unfortunately, when I went to the Eco Smart World website (Eco Smart World, 2023), I couldn’t find any mention of that statistic. The website looked weird in terms of content and wording. The website seems to have changed ownership at some point.

I can go into more detail about what makes a website look “weird” to me another day. In the meantime, my search for a primary source continued. I went on Google and tried searching for websites making claims about a billion whiteboard markers a year, but I couldn’t find a primary source. What I found instead was a whole new statistic from a whole new group; Scribo (JA Worldwide, 2022). Scribo, like EnduraMark, started as a college student team who wanted to solve whiteboard marker waste. Scribo says that 35 billion whiteboard markers a year are thrown out around the world! I’m going to continue to research this and see what I find.

References

Eco Smart World. (2023). Eco Smart World homepage. Retrieved from Eco Smart World: https://ecosmartworld.com/

JA Worldwide. (2022). JA Europe: Team Scribo. Retrieved from JA Worldwide: https://www.jaworldwide.org/stories/ja-europe-team-scribo

Narain, M. (2022, November 13). An EXPOsé. Retrieved from The Chronicle: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2022/11/111422-narain-an-expose

thinkspace. (2008, August 11). "Green" dry erase whiteboard markers for your office. Retrieved from Thinkspace: https://thinkspace.com/green-dry-erase-whiteboard-markers-for-your-office/

Whiteboard Markers. (2008, June 3). Did You Throw Away A Whiteboard Marker This Week? . Retrieved from Whiteboard Markers: http://whiteboardmarkers.blogspot.com/2008/06/did-you-throw-away-whiteboard-marker.html