Thursday, February 10, 2011

How many trees are needed to make a given amount of paper?


According to the USDA, each year 20,000,000 (million) trees taking up 5,000,000 acres of "natural" forest is cut down to produce 27,000 tons of paper for the publishing industry. Also consider the loss in nature's ability to cleanse the air we breathe as well as its contribution to global climate.

Here are some of the hard facts; some alternative solutions to a thorny problem; and some simple, inexpensive and inspiring ways each of us can help. We’ll start with

THE BAD NEWS

  • The most diverse forests in North America, which are in the Southern United States, contain the largest paper producing region in the world.
  • 20 million trees, or 5 million acres of natural forest, are cut down to make 27,000 tons of wood pulp used for the production of paper.
  • Of the global wood harvest, 42% goes to paper production.
  • The global production of pulp, paper and publishing is expected to increase 77% by the year 2020.
  • The United States is claimed to have 6 times the per capita consumption of paper over the world average.
  • The paper industry is the third highest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases to the air in the world, and the fifth highest emitter of industrial toxic waste to water.
  • The planet is exposed to 250,000 metric tons of toxic pollutants from paper manufacturers each year.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

1. Tree Farms

  • Replacing natural forest with tree farms creates a relatively reliable source of wood pulp, but reduces by 90% the number of species contained in a natural forest.
  • The conversion of forests to tree farms leads to a radical loss of freshwater, air quality, soil cohesion and animal, insect, bird and plant species.
  • Rural communities in and around these tree farms and their paper mills tend to be degraded economically and socially.
  • South American “paper forests,” as they are called, are expected to grow 70% by the year 2012.

2. Recycled Paper

Paul Hawken, co-founder of the Green Press Initiative has said that if all books were printed on recycled paper, the act of publishing and reading would begin to heal our forests and promote sustainable economic activity.

  • Currently, recycled paper represents less than 8% of the entire printing and writing market, because publishers claim it is not cost effective. However, market pricing analysis shows that switching from virgin fibers to 100% post-consumer recycled paper would equal an increase of about 20 cents per book. Many readers polled claimed a willingness to spend an extra dollar for books printed on recycled paper.
  • It takes an estimated one ton of recycled stock to make one ton of paper, while it takes an estimated two to three and half tons of virgin trees to make that same ton of paper.
  • One ton of recycled paper can save the equivalent of 24 trees of 40 foot height, 6 to 8 inch diameter.
  • One ton of recycled paper can save the equivalent of 7000 gallons of water; 60 pounds of air pollution; and 4100 killowatt hours of electricity.

3. Alternative, annual crops used for papermaking

Kenaf, which grows well in the Southeastern US, has a 3 to 5 times greater yield than the Southern pines which grow in the same region. Related to the hibiscus, it is originally an African plant which can grow up to 14 feet tall in under five months.

  • Industrial hemp, related to, but not the same plant as, marijuana grows up to 16 feet tall in 4 months, producing an estimated 10 tons an acre. It is not (yet) legal in the US.
  • Straw, the agricultural residue of a multitude of plants, goes underutilized every year in the US by an estimated 150 tons.
  • Visit http://www.lucidskies.com/paper.html for more information.

How Can I Help?

SIMPLE WAYS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

First of all, live your life as if everything was interconnected, everything was alive and everything was a miracle.

About Carolyn North

Photo by Susan Wilson

Carolyn North is a writer, healer and social activist whose latest book, ECSTATIC RELATIONS, A Memoir of Love has prompted this action to collaborate with TreePeople to protect the forests that are sacrificed daily for the printing of her books, and all the books we all read.

Long an advocate of healthy forests, she has worked at the Manitou Forest Sanctuary in southern Vermont, and also built the first permitted load-bearing, rice strawbale house in this country, in Northern California.

To learn more about her work – including her 8 published books – visit her website at: http://www.healingimprovisations.net

About Tree People

TreePeople has planted over 2 million trees in the Los Angeles area since 1973 in its work to help nature heal our cities. Having one of the nation's largest environmental education programs, TreePeople offers sustainable solutions to urban ecosytem problems including water, air quality, energy conservation and flood prevention. Originally started by teenagers, it is one of the most innovative, comprehensive and people-friendly environmental groups in the United States.

Publishers, authors and readers are invited to join Carolyn North and TreePeople to mitigate the impact on the environment in the following ways:

A donation of $25 will plant a tree and provide a 1-year membership to TreePeople. $100 will plant a grove of 5 trees

DONATE ONLINE at http://treepeople.org/

Source: http://www.ecstaticrelations.com/booksintotrees/

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There is no simple answer to these questions, and all calculations can be no better than "ballpark estimates."

Many people have heard the statistic that "a ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees." The "17 trees" number was popularized by Conservatree when it was a paper distributor, based on a report to Congress in the 1970s. It was calculated for newsprint, which is made in a totally different papermaking process from office and printing papers. But it was the best number anyone had, so it became the number everyone used to calculate number of trees saved by recycled paper, or number of trees cut to make virgin paper, no matter what type of paper they were talking about.

Paper is made from a mix of types of trees. Some are hardwood, some are softwood. In addition, some are tall, some old, some wide, some young, some thin. Many of the "trees" used to make paper are just chips and sawdust.

So how can one talk about a "typical tree"? And do numbers calculated 30 years ago still apply to today's much more efficient paper industry?

We decided it was time to update these numbers, so Conservatree has tracked down some ways to make ballpark estimates more reliable than in the past.

CONSIDERATIONS IN CALCULATING TREES TO PAPER

What kind of paper are you talking about?

Paper made in a "mechanical" or "groundwood" process (e.g. newsprint, telephone directories, base sheet for low-cost coated magazine and catalog papers)

uses trees about twice as efficiently as

paper made in the "kraft" or "freesheet" process (e.g. office and printing papers, letterhead, business cards, copy paper, base sheet for higher-quality coated magazine and catalog papers, advertising papers, offset papers).

Is the paper "coated" or "uncoated"?

The fiber in a coated paper (most often used for magazines and catalogs, with a clay coating that may be glossy or matte, or other finishes) may be only a little more than 50% of the entire sheet, because the clay coating makes up so much of the weight of the paper.

As a ballpark estimate, you can use .64 as the fiber estimate for coated papers compared to the entire weight of the sheet. (Fiber estimate calculation by Alliance for Environmental Innovation)

So how many trees would make a ton of paper?

Claudia Thompson, in her book Recycled Papers: The Essential Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), reports on an estimate calculated by Tom Soder, then a graduate student in the Pulp and Paper Technology Program at the University of Maine. He calculated that, based on a mixture of softwoods and hardwoods 40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter, it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper, using the kraft chemical (freesheet) pulping process.

If we assume that the groundwood process is about twice as efficient in using trees, then we can estimate that it takes about 12 trees to make a ton of groundwood and newsprint. (The number will vary somewhat because there often is more fiber in newsprint than in office paper, and there are several different ways of making this type of paper.)

SOME TYPICAL CALCULATIONS

1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees

1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees

A "pallet" of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton. Therefore,

1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees

1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)

1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)

1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)

How do you calculate how many trees are saved by using recycled paper?

(1) Multiply the number of trees needed to make a ton of the kind of paper you're talking about (groundwood or freesheet), then

(2) multiply by the percent recycled content in the paper.

For example,

1 ton (40 cartons) of 30% postconsumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees

1 ton of 50% postconsumer content copier paper saves 12 trees.

Source: http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

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Number of trees for BOOKS:

U.S.: 30 million per year

Number of tress for NEWSPAPERS (and magazines):

U.S.: 90 million per year

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Number of trees per magazine:

"A standard sized tree, if there is such a thing (10-15m tall, 1-1.5 m circumference) can make enough pulp for 8000-13000 sheets of paper.

If your magazine has say, 100 sheets, that's 80-130 magazines per tree. Your magazine might take .0075-.0125 trees."

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Number of trees to produce PHONEBOOKS:

Did you know that up to 5 million trees are cut down each year to create the white pages phone book and that only 22% of recipients recycle when disposing of them which equates to 165,000 tons of waste in landfills? In addition, almost 75% of consumers are completely unaware of the environmental and financial impact in printing, delivering and recycling these books. Given that you likely use online directories, social networks and mobile phone applications to find the contact information you need, it simply does not make sense to have the white pages phone books forcefully delivered to us every year.

Source: http://www.banthephonebook.org/

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Frequently Asked Questions
Bestwebsitemaker


What is Green Press Initiative?
Green Press Initiative (GPI) is a non-profit program which takes a collaborative approach towards working with publishers, printers, paper manufacturers and others in the book and newspaper industries to minimize social and environmental impacts, including impacts on endangered forests, impacts on climate change, and impacts on communities where paper fiber is sourced.

When was GPI founded?
GPI was founded in 2001. Initially the focus was entirely on the book industry, however, the program was expanded to include the newspaper industry in 2007.

What are the impacts of the paper industry and books/newspapers?
The entire paper industry, when accounting for forest carbon loss, emits nearly 750 million tons of C02 equivalent annually – nearly 10% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This is equivalent to the annual emissions of over 136 million cars. The U.S. book and newspaper industries combined require the harvest of 125 million trees each year and emit over 40 million metric tons of CO2 annually; equivalent to the annual CO2 emmissions of 7.3 million cars.

Impacts on Endangered Forests:
Each year the U.S book industry uses approximately 30 million trees, and the U.S. newspaper industry consumes 95 million trees. Many of these trees are from old growth and endangered forests, and the demand for paper is encouraging the practice of converting natural forests into single species tree plantations that support only a fraction of the biodiversity.

Impacts on Climate Change
The paper industry is the fourth largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and books and newspapers release greenhouse gases thought their lifecycles. Globally, scientist estimate that deforestation is responsible for 25% of human caused greenhouse gases. When trees are cut to make paper, not only do they cease to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, but greenhouse gases are released to the atmosphere when plant material not used makes paper decays or is burned as a source of power at the mill. As a result of these emissions and those associated with soil disturbances at the site of harvest, even trees are replanted, it can take up to 25 years for a newly planted forest to stop being a net emitter of greenhouse gases, and hundreds of years before they store the same amount of carbon as an undisturbed forest.

GPI worked to complete the first ever Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts report for the U.S. book industry. It was the first comprehensive carbon footprint analysis of a publishing sector and is being used as a model in other paper sectors. This assessment found that the entire book industry, through all steps of production, retail, and publishing activities, emits a net 8.85 pounds per book.

Impacts on Communities
In Canada, Indonesia, Brazil and many other countries throughout the world, people who rely on forests for their livelihood have been severely impacted by the paper industry. From the destruction of forests needed to survive to some being forced from their land, the paper industry has disrupted the way of life for these communities.

What is the Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing?
The Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing is an industry-developed declaration of meaningful environmental goals and timelines for industry transformation. It spurred the adoption of environmental paper policies with nearly 200 publishers and printers, following the guidelines in the Treatise

What are the benefits of recycled paper?
Each ton of recycled fiber that replaces a ton of virgin fiber saves 17-24 mature trees and up to 7.5 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions.

Also, recycling keeps paper out of landfills, which at current levels makes up 26% of landfills. The degradation produces methane a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat trapping capacity of carbon dioxide and landfills are the source of 34% of methane releases—the single largest source in the U.S.

What are the benefits of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified papers?
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper ensures that the fiber to make paper does not originate from Endangered Forests or areas of social conflict. They work to keep natural and biodiverse forests from being converted to single-species tree farms after harvest and integrate the concerns of indigenous and local communities into forest plans and assessments.

What progress has been achieved in recent years?
GPI’s consistent education and advocacy work have also spurred the development of environmental paper policies from over 180 book publishers – approximately 42% of market-share in the U.S. book sector. This has resulted in a six fold increase in recycled fiber use-- representative of a reduction of over approximately 1.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to over 250,000 cars/yr) and nearly 3 million trees per year

We’ve helped to advance the development of nearly 30 new eco-paper grades, including recycled, postconsumer recycled and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) fiber content and supported a cut in price premiums by 50%, and there are now 31 U.S. and Canadian printers serving U.S. publishers are now stocking environmental grades in-house.

Source: http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/about/faq.htm

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