Tree Free Paper — Excerpts

The Fate of the Forests by Randy Hayes

Can printing on the right paper really help the world's problems?

We not only hope so — we know so. By carefully choosing fibers and manufacturing processes, you can influence the fate of the world's forests and lessen other negative impacts of paper production.

From Indonesia to Siberia, and British Columbia to Chile, wild forests are under threat from massive logging operations, as the ever-increasing demand for paper drives us further into remote areas. For paper products alone, an estimated four billion trees are cut each year, a number that could easily double within 20 years.Yet a concerted effort could, in our lifetime, lead us away from the deforestation crisis and toward the creation of a more sustainable society.

Tree-free fiber development is a vital component of what we call “preferred fibers.” Preferred fibers are ones that do little or no harm to wild natural forests. They can either be wood fibers or agriculturally derived tree-free fibers. There are two types of preferred wood-based paper: paper made from 100 percent postconsumer materials and paper made from tree fibers that have been cut under strict ecological logging criteria and certified by an independent third party. Regardless of what fiber is used, however, it is important to remember that all paper production methods require pulping chemicals, consume energy and water, and generate solid waste of some sort. Whenever possible, we should do our best to reduce paper consumption and eliminate unnecessary uses of it.

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

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