“The Paper Thing Again”

“Paper comes from an enormously abundant renewable resource. It’s biodegradable, so it’s not a threat in landfills (or woodstoves). So…frankly I don’t give a hang about using a few more sheets. The best you can do by reducing usage is to put paper industry workers out of work.”

I saw the above comment on one of my favorite blogs. It is hard to believe someone can actually believe that. I thought it would be helpful to provide a few facts to dispel such idiocy.

It takes a lot of resources to produce, package, ship and eventually discard a few sheets of paper. Here are some facts from a great web site you may want to visit.

http://www.printgreener.com/earthday.html

Printing Facts
· Average cost of a wasted page $0.062
· Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that's 1,410 wasted pages per year!
· The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year.
· While 3 out of 4 office workers print from the Internet, 90% of people with a printer at home print Internet content.

Consumption
· In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams). That’s the equivalent of 178 million trees!
· The U.S. is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average.
· In the United States, we use enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that’s 6,815 miles long. That’s more than the distance from New York to Tokyo!

Energy
· The U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry.
· Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months).

Water
· Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can.
· Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water.

Waste
· One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.
· In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded in the United States.
· Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 2,278 lb of solid waste

CO2
· Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 5,690 lb. of greenhouse gases (the equivalent of 6 months of car exhaust).
· Dumping paper in landfill adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes, with 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Ink
· If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,000.
· If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink it would cost $5.9 billion.