The Case for Tree-free Papers by Dan Imhoff

We are anything but a paperless society. Each year, the average American consumes more than 700 pounds of paper, not just for communication and record keeping, but to package food, consumer and medical products, render life convenient and more sanitary, promote commerce and democracy, and preserve our soulful expressions. This is ten times the rate at the turn of the century, and nearly twice the average per-capita consumption in 1970-and it's growing every year. Computers, copiers, modems, faxes and other machines devised to render paper obsolete only encourage us to print more documents more often. Every 12 months, a single office employee can stack up a four-foot-high column of 10,000 sheets, while the national copy-paper norm tops out at 27 pounds per person. At home and on the run, we discard approximately 290 pounds of food packaging per person, of which a significant portion is paper. One industry expert estimates our annual toilet-paper use at 70 rolls each. While the United States continues to use more than a third of global paper products, industrializing countries-particularly those in Asia-are rapidly increasing their intake as well.

Considering the slow but steady increase of recycled paper products and curbside collection systems over the past decade, one might assume that deforestation is on the decline. Recycled fibers have certainly proven themselves versatile and worthy of a broad range of applications-from building materials and corrugated cardboard to high-quality papers. Our efforts at recycling paper (including the building of more than a dozen new deinking mills in the 1990s) have been steps in the right direction, but they have not silenced the saws. Recycled papers are available for nearly every printing need, yet the market has been slow to respond, and the industry is still struggling to compete with its virgin wood-based rivals. According to paper industry watcher Susan Kinsella, deinking mills still need major technological advances to deal with contamination problems of lower grade materials such as copier and laser toner polymers, “sticky” notes, mailing labels, envelope seals and other adhesives. In addition, Kinsella estimates that at least 15 million more tons of high-grade postconsumer printing and writing papers could be channeled to the recycling loop-three times the amount currently being reused.

To add insult to injury, many manufacturers of recycled paper pulp still can't compete economically with the low prices that suppliers are offering on virgin wood pulp-further fueling the clearcutting of the world's vanishing forests. For example, some of the widely televised fires that destroyed up to two million acres of forest in Indonesia in 1997 were caused by large pulp and paper corporations clearing land for pulpwood plantations.

Paper is the fastest growing segment of the wood products industry and by extremely conservative estimates at least one out of every three trees harvested today ends up as pulp. Forest activists believe that percentage is far higher. Ancient forests are often the victims, their trees shredded into chips or shipped whole across oceans, only to be chemically pulverized, bleached and flattened to satiate the world's ever-increasing appetite for paper products. In the process we lose flora and fauna, and those species that do manage to survive find their habitats severely fragmented. It is almost beyond comprehension that in 1999 we are still harvesting wild forests and reducing them to a slurry of toxic fibers-of which the resulting sludge is landfilled or incinerated-in order to make tens of millions of annual telephone directories, mountains of glossy throwaway direct mail pieces, slick product brochures and annual reports. As industrialized societies, we have overstepped our bounds.

Consumers, environmental groups and many industry members now agree that the tree-based paper paradigm presently dominating global production is not ecologically sustainable for the long term and rarely promotes the most appropriate use of wood. As we face the start of a new century and millennium, the remnants of the last great tropical forests of South America and Asia and the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia hang in the balance. If we reduce our levels of consumption, offer legal protection for remaining native forests, and develop resources other than trees from which to fashion paper, worldwide deforestation can be curtailed.

Other fiber sources do exist. In fact, many have been around for centuries. They go by a number of terms: tree-free, nonwood, alternative fibers, environmentally preferable. Generally speaking, the tree-free papers we're emphasizing in this book offer a number of environmental advantages over wood-based varieties. They are primarily derived from annual crops, either grown intentionally for paper, or abundant byproducts of food and fiber production. Because they grow only for one season, these plants don't develop the high levels of lignins that bind tree cellulose fibers together. This means tree-free fibers can be pulped with significantly fewer chemicals, and less energy and water. Most are lighter in color than wood fibers, and require less, if any, bleach to whiten them. Both these advantages would significantly reduce the amount of toxic effluent and sludge that are now inevitable byproducts of most wood-based paper operations. Finally, most of these crops can be blended with postconsumer materials to create quality papers for a variety of applications.

The popular concept of a tree-free paper industry promotes the goal of keeping old-growth forests and trees growing on U.S. federal forest lands out of the paper stream. A tree-free paper industry could greatly benefit rural economies as well. In contrast to huge capital-intensive manufacturing facilities that require an endless supply of wood, tree-free proponents are working to establish a new generation of smaller-scale “mini-mills” which can process a variety of regionally produced fibers. The rice-growing region of the Sacramento Valley has, for example, often been cited as a place where a local rice straw pulp plant could help produce papers for Northern California consumption. Other potential materials for a California “fiber-shed” include cotton linters (the fine fuzz that surrounds the seed), cotton gin waste, and postconsumer papers and fabric scraps from urban areas. Similarly, the corn belt of the Midwest could support several mini-mills with its annual supply of corn husks and stalks. And the hot, humid Southeast is the focus of fiber crop projects such as kenaf and industrial hemp.

It is one thing to proselytize about a new era of tree-free paper production. It's another to face up to the manufacturing challenges, current economic realities and potential ecological implications of large-scale tree-free paper production. A mainstream tree-free paper industry definitely faces some major obstacles, not the least of which are a present lack of adequate consumer demand and a dearth of competitive infrastructures. Without consumers willing to pay a little extra for those tree-free papers that now exist, the future for more resourceful and far less polluting mini-mills will remain more conceptual than economically viable. Availability will continue to be inconsistent among some paper companies, keeping many papers prohibitively expensive. Like the organic farming community, which has created a safer, more sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture, tree-free paper companies have been working against enormous odds to redefine the terms for paper production. According to the Paper Task Force Report (1995) the wood-based global paper industry is the fourth- largest and most capital-intensive manufacturing sector in the world. Most major paper companies are vertically integrated, and continue to enjoy extremely lucrative privileges to harvest timber from public lands. Because they have invested billions of dollars in (often highly polluting) wood-exploiting technologies, many companies are reluctant to change. Experts like Randy Hayes, Maureen Smith, Emily Miggins and others predict that sooner or later, however, all companies will have to shift away from the reliance on trees for paper fibers. Most of the companies whose papers you'll find in the back of this book and listed in the directory have already been working for more than a decade on this problem. Crane & Company has been working for centuries.

This is not to say that we should no longer consume wood products of any kind. In certain heavily forested regions of the country, trees may remain the best choice of fibers. To this end, sustainable forestry initiatives have emerged in the last decade, and the first U.S.-made papers containing Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) third-party certified tree pulp debuted in October 1998. Forests certified by FSC agencies adhere to strict guidelines that attempt to balance selective management practices with watershed and endangered species protection. European markets for FSC sustainably harvested wood products are predicted to grow significantly by early next century. According to Richard Donovan, Director of an FSC certification agency called SmartWood, pulp and paper products are an important component of the sustainable forestry movement. “Selectively harvesting and selling smaller trees for paper, while leaving other higher-value trees for the future, allows property owners to restore an older growth structure to the forest and make money in the interim,” says Donovan.

We also need to develop the discipline to use fewer paper and wood products. When you do need paper for a printing project, we hope you'll consider one of the suppliers in this guide for the job. Our goals as purchasers should always include minimizing the non-certified virgin wood content in the paper products we buy. This can be done by maximizing the amount of alternative tree-free fibers and postconsumer content in any paper products we purchase. (When you do choose a paper with wood-based content, look for FSC certification). Generally speaking, less harmful pulping procedures that use less water and energy to convert fibers to paper are the added benefits of choosing paper with a lower virgin wood content. Third-party validation of fiber sources and pulping processes can bolster your assurance about a paper's origin.

Such a movement can only gain its momentum from a strong marketplace, as well as from a recognition of the intrinsic value of wild forests. While the nonwood and postconsumer products industry struggles for survival, the wood-based paper industry will continue mowing down natural forests and replacing them with plantations of fast-growing trees-usually exotic species, sometimes genetically engineered, utilizing chemically intensive silvacultural practices.

It seems all too fashionable to leap on the millennium bandwagon, but the start of a new century does serve as a reminder that we have a chance to alter the course of history. Wood-based papers have only existed since the mid-19th century. We now have an opportunity to create a paper industry that future generations might thank us for, one that turned a corner and allowed us to save forests thousands of years in the making, to be kept forever wild for their own sake. The papers and ideas in this book, along with a change in purchasing habits, comprise a first step.

Reprinted from The SimpleLife Guide to Tree-free, Recycled, and Certified Papers, 1999