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Paper Usage and Recycling : How much Paper do we Waste?
The Facts of Resource Usage
* In prehistoric times, 60% of the earth's surface was covered by forests - today that amount has been reduced by 30% and is still shrinking.
* It takes 17 pulpwood market-sized trees to make a ton of paper, or one tree makes about 11,500 pages of 8.5 x 11 20-pound paper.
* Each one million pages of paper not printed saves 85 pulp trees.
* To produce one trillion pages of paper takes 8.5 million acres of trees, representing an area larger than the country of Belgium or the state of Maryland.
* It takes 390 gallons of oil to produce a ton of paper.
* That ton of paper, when disposed of, takes up nearly 8 cubic feet of public landfill space.
* That public landfill is approximately 36% waste paper products.
The Facts of Office Waste
* Each person in an office on average uses 2.5 pounds of paper each week.
* The average office worker generates between 120 - 150 pounds of recoverable white office paper a year.
* Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year -- enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California.
Most companies I have worked for have actively promoted internet/computer storage and distribution of informtion. Think about your own home and work environment - how can you stop using paper to keep records, or distribute information?
The Facts about the Facts
The facts were gleaned from:
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Ecoweb's Factoids
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The EarthWorks Group's "The Recycler's Handbook"
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The National Office Paper Recycling Project's "Office Paper Recycling Guide"
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American Forest and Paper Association
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Lisa Shea's Research
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