Environment
Why is recycled paper better for the environment than virgin paper?
It's common sense that making new paper from old paper is easier on the Earth.
Here's why:
• It helps preserve forests, because it reduces demand for wood;
• It conserves resources and generates less pollution during manufacturing,
because the fibers have already been processed once; and
• It reduces solid waste, because it diverts usable paper from the waste stream.
(Environmental Defense and the Alliance for Environmental Innovation - www.environmentalpaper.org)
A tree can produce about 80,500 sheets of paper, thus it requires about 786 million trees to produce the world's annual paper supply. The UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999 estimates that paper production provides 1,510 sheets of paper per inhabitant of the world on average, although in fact the inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper annually (15 reams), according to the ENST report. At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents. (UNESCO Statistical Handbook for 1999)
Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999, p21))
Most of the world’s paper supply, about 71 percent, is not made from timber harvested at tree farms but from forest-harvested timber, from regions with ecologically valuable, biologically diverse habitat. (http://www.environmentalpaper.org/PAPER-statistics.html - Toward a Sustainable Paper Cycle: An Independent Study on the Sustainability of the Pulp and Paper Industry, 1996)
Nearly a ton of new recycled paper can be made from a ton of recycled stock compared to the 2-3.5 tons of trees required to make a ton of virgin paper. This is one of the reasons recycled paper results in lower solid waste byproducts and uses less energy, water and chemicals. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))
Buying recycled products helps create markets for recovered materials and is a necessary component of closing the recycling loop. Recycled-content products typically perform as well or better than virgin products and often are competitively priced. Buy-recycled campaigns also can bolster a company's environmental image.
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