Ecopaper Present's the Green Blog

How many trees are one ton of recycled paper?
I’m not a big fan of recycled papers in fact I find it very misleading, if for example I was to create a secondary market where the scraps and cuttings from one product were reused and falsely certified as “Recycled”. Which is exactly what the corporate paper mills are doing. In other words converting from much larger then needed paper sizes, my own waste which then can be called recycled paper is sold at a higher price to meet the current demand of such paper. This is what the paper mills do and because of mislabeling and fancy certifying we buy it thinking that we are being effective. There are virgin pulp trees in recycled paper it’s just being relabeled. “Recycled paper means nothing” what your really looking for is a Tree- Free Paper or something with the most Post-Consumer content as possible.

So how many trees would make a ton of paper?
A graduate student in the Pulp and Paper Technology Program 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 (free sheet) pulping process.
If we assume that the ground wood process is about twice as efficient in using trees, then we can estimate that it takes about 12 trees to make a ton of ground wood 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.)

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 our fibers saves 17 trees." The "17 trees" number was popularized by EcoPaper.com when it was calculated in the mid 1990s, 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, and 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 EcoPaper.com has tracked down some ways to make ballpark estimates more reliable than in the past.
 
 
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 (ground wood or free sheet), then
(2) multiply by the percent recycled content in the paper.
For example,
1 ton (40 cartons) of 30% post consumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees
1 ton of 50% post consumer content copier paper saves 12 trees.
 
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)

In closing all this is very confusing, so why not make a simpler calculation? or an even better solution “Just don’t use Trees”

1. The forests.
Over 40 percent of the global industrial wood harvest is pulped for paper.1 The last remaining old-growth forests in northern Canada, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Siberia, and other areas are now being logged for pulp wood as well as plantation conversion. At home in the southeastern United States, the world’s largest pulp producing region, an estimated 5 million acres of forests are logged for paper each year (an area the size of New Jersey).

2. Economic and human population growth.
U.S. citizens consume an annual average of over 600 pounds of paper per person. Global pulp and paper consumption is predicted to rise dramatically over the next 20 years - by as much as 80 percent according to some estimates. Leading the way will be printing and writing as well as office paper grades. In The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2001), the authors report that the adoption of e-mail alone causes an organization to increase its paper consumption by an average of 40 percent. Any gains in production efficiencies achieved by the industry may not be enough to offset the massive growth in worldwide demand for paper in the coming decades.

3. Invisibles.
Many of the impacts of modern paper production occur far beyond our visual scope and take effect cumulatively, over long periods of time. Take water, for example. The pulp and paper industry consumes more water per ton of product than any other industry. Everyday, thousands of gallons of waste water containing barely detectable but persistently toxic bleaching and pulping compounds are released from paper mills. Paper production is also energy-intensive, rivaling steel and iron in the amount of energy used per ton of product. Worldwide, it is the fifth largest consumer of energy,4 with significant greenhouse gases (nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, and volatile organic compounds) resulting from this energy production.

4. Stump to dump life cycles.
According to the GrassRoots Recycling Network, over half of U.S. paper travels a linear path between the forest, mills, end-users, and landfills. Landfills are the primary source of man-made, climate altering methane emissions. Because paper products are the number one component in landfills, they earn the rank as the chief culprit in methane production.

5. Inefficiencies.
Producing one ton of paper from virgin wood fibers requires 2 to 3.5 tons of trees. Chipping, grinding, whitening, rinsing, and separating the useful fibers from the lignins that bind them together as tree cellulose requires water, energy, and chemicals, and generate air, water, and solid waste pollution as byproducts.

6. Recycling cuts impacts.
It has been well documented that using recycled materials to produce new papers can save significant amounts of materials, water, chemicals, and energy. Nearly a ton of recovered paper can be pulped to produce a ton of recycled stock. Because recycled fibers have already been converted, reprocessing requires between 10 and 40 percent of the energy needed in virgin processing. Although I support recycling not a big fan of recycled papers the labeling and information be provided is very misleading will address this in future blogs.

7. Urban forests.
New York City contains more cellulose per acre (due to paper consumption) than the Amazon rainforest, according to senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. In fact, scrap paper is the number one export from the port of New York. Optimizing the amount of recycled materials available in urban areas around the world could allow us to shift the burden away from consuming the forests for paper products. Let’s not forget textile castaways, the original paper fiber!

8. Virgin junk mail.
Each year, retailers send the equivalent of 59 catalogs for every U.S. citizen - a total of nearly 17 billion.8 According to a study by Environmental Defense, only 6 out of 42 major catalog companies specify papers with significant recycled content, while most use 100 percent virgin paper. Oregon-based company worked with suppliers to source paper with at least 10 percent post-consumer content with comparable production values and at no additional costs.

9. Chlorine processing.
The pulping and whitening of virgin wood fibers with chlorine bleaches (chlorine, chlorine dioxide, and sodium hypochlorite) produce hazardous byproducts, including dioxins, furans, and other absorbable organic halides. Recognizing this, the worldwide pulp and paper industry has primarily moved toward Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) processing, which cuts measurable discharges by as much 90 percent - but by no means eliminates them (unless combined with enhanced delignification technologies). The most environmentally preferable bleaching processes for virgin pulp are Totally Chlorine Free (TCF) for virgin and Processed Chlorine Free (PCF) for recycled fibers. They substitute oxygen, hydrogen peroxide, or ozone in the processing sequence.

10. Farm-raised alternatives.
While industrial agriculture is not without serious environmental consequences, the use of multi-purpose fiber crops such as banana, hemp, kenaf, and flax as well as crop residues like straw, bagasse, and cotton linters, can also help to relieve pressure on forests. In general, these fibers require far less chemicals, water, and energy to process.

Keeping up with the continual changes in mill ownership, grade specifications, and pulping processes is not always an easy endeavor. But as paper users and global citizens, it’s part of our duty to make the most informed purchasing decisions possible. Mills could help us by creating a standard label that clearly identifies the exact fiber contents and pulping processes. In the mean time, the onus is on the purchaser. Recycling means more than just participating in curbside and office collection programs, it requires active participation as paper buyers in all aspects of our home and work lives. This is what builds markets and will ultimately help to decrease prices and improve quality. And while maximizing recycled content should be our bottom line, we must not forget to support chlorine-free technologies, and agricultural fibers.

I don’t know if any of you have noticed, early in the morning, the sunlight on the waters. How extraordinarily soft is the light, and how the dark waters dance, with the morning stars over the trees, the only star in the sky. Do you ever notice any of that? Or are you so busy, so occupied with the daily routine, that you forget or have never known the rich beauty of this earth—this earth on which all of us have to live? Whether we call ourselves communists or capitalists, Hindus or Buddhists, Muslims or Christians, whether we are blind, lame, or well and happy, this earth is ours. It is our earth, not somebody else’s; it is not only the rich man’s earth, it does not belong exclusively to the powerful rulers, to the nobles of the land, but it is our earth, yours and mine. We are nobodies, yet we also live on this earth and we all have to live together. It is the world of the poor as well as of the rich, of the unlettered as well as of the learned; it is our world, and I think it is very important to feel this and to love the earth, not just occasionally on a peaceful morning, but all the time.

“By protecting nature’s resources, we help preserve an inexhaustible storehouse of riches. We restore and improve as we preserve nature’s abundance.”
Costa Rica Natural & Ecopaper have been affectionately known at home in Costa Rica as ‘The Banana Paper Guys’. Since 1995, we have offered gifts perfect for writers and artists as well as those like my friends who write down favorite quotes, most intimate thoughts are scribbled in the stack of journals by their bedside. Costa Rica Natural Banana Paper Company’s products feature all natural fibers, eco-friendly fibers. “No tree has been cut to produce banana paper,” “Contrastingly, its beauty lightens from an artistic acid free blend of banana bunch stock fiber, injurious by-product of the banana agro-industry, and urban post consumer paper. It’s about making natural banana fiber paper that preserve’s our life’s and nature.”
Each year, 15 countries process 42 million tons of bananas within this huge (and ancient) banana agro-industry. Much of the waste produced—over 10 million metric tons—is comprised of the pinzote, or the stem of the banana. The pinzote waste is fiber that can be used to produce paper, and that’s exactly what Ecoaper does. Offering notebooks and journals in a variety of shapes and sizes in colorful designed collections that remind us all of our commitment to the environment, as well as loose leaf, hand-made paper, ruled filler paper, fax- and printing-appropriate blank paper, and envelopes, our eco company offers a variety of options to make your life environmentally friendly, from holiday and year-round gift-giving to everyday green living.

One of the most significant, and perhaps least understood,
impacts of the paper industry are climate change. Every phase of paper’s lifecycle contributes to global warming, from harvesting trees to production of pulp and paper to eventual disposal.

It is estimated that 42% of the industrial wood harvest is
used to make paper—a sobering fact given that forests store
roughly 50 percent of all terrestrial carbon, making them
one of our most important safeguards against climate
change. Old-growth and mature, second-growth natural
forests store much larger amounts of carbon than newly
planted stands and once logged, require decades to recover
the original amount of carbon they contained.
Whether the tree grew in a mature forest or industrial tree
plantation, climate change impacts multiply after it is harvested.

The pulp and paper industry is the fourth largest emitter of
greenhouse gases among manufacturing industries, and contributes 9 percent of total manufacturing carbon dioxide emissions.

The biggest greenhouse gas releases in pulp and paper
manufacturing come from the energy production needed to
power the pulp and paper mill.

The climate change effects of paper carry all the way
through to disposal. If paper is land filled rather than recycled, it decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse
gas with 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.
More than one-third of municipal solid waste is paper,
and municipal landfills account for 34 percent of human related methane emissions to the atmosphere, making landfills the single largest source of such emissions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified the decomposition of paper as among the most significant sources of landfill methane.
The climate benefits of reducing paper consumption are
significant. If, for example, the United States cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1.6 million tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.

By embracing a Common Vision—Minimizing virgin pulp paper consumption, maximizing tree free content,sourcing fiber responsibly and employing cleaner production
practices—paper manufacturers, such as Ecopaper.com / Costa Rica Natural can dramatically reduce the climate change impacts of the paper industry. Please use our Banana Papers and tree-tree papers when you can.

Having dyslexia, I have been told that there are many things I would not be able to do in life. This never stopped me from doing what I wanted to do. Over the years of making fine environmental papers, journaling has become a passion of mine. Amazing things are always happening as a result of this practice. I would like to share the positive effects of journaling with you.

Positive Effects of Journaling

Why Keep a Journal?
One of the practices that has changed my own life is the regular habit of journaling. I encourage – and challenge – my family, friends and co-workers to begin journaling in an effort to become their best selves. Here is some of my thinking on why journaling is a powerful tool for personal discovery and elite performance:

1. Journaling allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distill it into precise language. Do you remember when you were in school and you thought you knew the material for an exam only to meet with a study group and realize after discussing the material, that there were gaps in your understanding? Having a conversation about something forces you to find specific language for your thinking. Journaling is a conversation that you have with yourself. The more you journal, the more precision of thought you build. This brings great clarity to your life. With greater clarity, you can make choose different choices required to create new changes.

2. Journaling allows you a place to process unfelt emotions. In my life, I have come to realize that most people have a great deal of anger that resides within them (along with many other latent emotional baggage). Emotions affect our daily choices, often at a subconscious level. Many people act in overly aggressive or hurtful ways, blaming the other person, rather than assuming personal responsibility and investigating the deeper reasons why they are behaving as they do. Writing in a journal will allow you to process anger, sadness or hurts that you may have sustained along the journey of your life. This releases you and allows you to find greater freedom and make better choices, both professionally and personally.

3. Writing in a journal allows you to record your dreams. Dreams create hopefulness. The more intimate you can become with your dreams and the longings of your heart, the greater inspiration you can bring to your days. This promotes positive energy which creates a richer experience of life.

4. Writing in a journal allows you to deepen your understanding. The mere action of writing something down allows for a more effective integration of learning. When you go to a seminar and take notes, memory will be ‘stickier’ than if you do not take notes. In the same way, journaling allows you to learn from life. It allows you to let your days serve you. You become wiser each day.

5. Journaling deepens commitment. The very act of writing things down deepens your resolve to make good things happen in your life. Take 15 minutes to write about the day you want to create and the choices you are dedicated to making in order to create an excellent day. This simple act will allow you to be much more proactive rather than reactive as you live out the remaining hours of this day.

Try it.
Watch yourself learn, change and grow - quickly and effectively with journaling

• Life Mapping - Start with the big picture of your life. • Awareness - Learn to go deeper and to be more expansive. • Unraveling Subconscious Shadows - Get clear about what you want. • Goals - Clarifying what I want in life. • Commitment - Clarity builds willpower. • Healing - Focus healing the past and feeling better about yourself. • Manifesting Goals and Creating What You Want what you want. Master anchoring, integration and co-creating. • Time Management - Overcome chaos, procrastination, time wasting and more • Motivation - Tap into and maintain your natural power and passion. • Creativity and Imagination - This single page will give you lots of new ideas. • Life Purpose - Clarify your direction and destiny in life. • Know Your Soul - Capture ways in which Soul works through you • Decision Making - Make clearer, more creative and more fun choices.

Benjamin Wong is a Art student at the Academy of Art University in San Fransisco. As a school project, he chose a way to make ecopaper's marketing more appealing. This is his story

The Reason

With the growing awareness of sustainability today, the way we use nature's resources needs to be re-examined in order to understand the necessary changes needed to make our environment a much better place to live in. Sustainability and environmentalism are in need of a makeover in order to become more attractive and to be able to reach out to a larger audience.

The Why

During my Fall semester (2008) at the Academy of Art University (San Francisco, CA), I had taken a course called Graphic Design 2 under the direction of my instructor, Laura Milton. The course was designed to focus on the implications of sustainability for a specific industry, in this case I chose the paper industry. The chosen company would then go through a process of developing a new way of marketing its products and/or services in a more appealing way. After having done research on the specific company and its market, I began the process of rebranding the company and giving it a whole new voice based on the core messages and ideas needed to communicate to the masses.

Ecopaper Gets Chosen

After researching various companies I came upon Ecopaper and was intrigued with the idea of having "tree-free paper", which was something I have never heard about before. As I looked further into the ideas and concept of Ecopaper, it was amazing to find out how the company was able to reuse agricultural waste (bananas, lemons, mangoes etc.) as a sustainable method to save our environment and rain forests from being lost all together. I felt it was a great opportunity to be able to give the company a new voice and to let people know of its innovative ideas and how everyone can become a part of this growing awareness.

The Idea

The idea of this project was to see how our final design campaign will be used by the company for its exhibit at the San Francisco Green Festival. The redesign of the current logo was tough. I went through a series of sketches, some involving ideas of growth within an environment and other ideas about paper coming from its 'roots'. I then thought of trying to communicate the feeling of where Ecopaper had originated from, and understanding the meaning and purpose behind the company. So I decided to stray away from the idea of just recycling, but to understand that the company wants to preserve the rain forest environment through the creation of tree-free papers. So after several sketches and computer revisions, I decided to incorporate a bird that would symbolize the environment of Costa Rica, which was where the idea of having tree-free paper had begun.

The Process

The next process was to design a brochure that would help the reader become more aware of what Ecopaper is doing and how the company is making a change in the world through a strong narrative structure. My concept for this piece was to find unique and common sayings/quotes that would be easily understood by the reader, but to also help them relate back to the piece. Take for instance the saying "When life gives you lemons...", which in turn ended with "make paper". Having the contrast between a close up image of a lemon in relation to the bold typography really helps emphasis the saying. The quotes/sayings were intended to grab the readers attention and to make them want to find out the full meaning, which may have them wondering how one could ever produce paper out of lemons. The brochure moves onto discussing the process of making tree-free paper, and later talking about how we should be understanding of our paper wastes and to encourage thoroughness. I've also provided a spread dedicated to infographics that show the progression of paper recovery since 1993. The last spread goes into detail about where the reader can purchase from Ecopaper and how a percentage of their purchases will benefit under privileged orphans at Hospicio De Huerfanos San Jose.

As a promotional item for the campaign, I decided to use the same concept seen in the brochure, but putting more emphasis on Ecopaper's Banana paper to grab attention. So with the headline boldly saying "Instant paper: Just add banana" it becomes intriguing to the viewer, which in turn can draw interest to the company to find out more information through the brochure and the website. Another promotional item was a set of notepads that were to be given out as samples, using specific papers from the collection.

The Result

This project has definitely opened up my eyes and has also been inspiring throughout the process. Learning about the process it takes to produce tree-free paper has really made me understand that there is so much potential to make our environment a much better place to live in.

1000 80 page 6 x 8 journals = 411 lbs of paper
made with Banana fiber and 100% post consumer fiber saves…
1,421 lbs wood A total of 5 trees that supply enough oxygen for 3 people.
1,797 gal water Enough water to take 104 eight-minute showers.
3mln BTUs energy Enough energy to power an average American household for 14 days.
433 lbs emissions Carbon sequestered by 5 tree seedlings grown for 10 years.
231 lbs solid waste A total of 8 thirty-two gallon garbage cans of waste.

411 lbs of tree free paper made with 100% renewable energy saves…
378 lbs CO2, SO2, And NO (nitrogen oxide) Combined amount of CO2, SO2, and NOx not emitted.
Your savings of these greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to…
25 hours Total continuous electricity used by a single-family home

115 lbs Amount of waste recycled instead of land filled

One 6 x 8 , 80 page Banana Journal saves 1.42 lbs. of a tree not used.

"Think of the hundreds of times a day we touch paper -- newspapers, cereal boxes, toilet paper, water bottle labels, parking tickets, streams of catalogs and junk mail, money, tissues, books, shopping bags, receipts, napkins, printer and copier paper at home and work, magazines, to-go food packaging. This list could fill a paperback."
Put another way, the 700-pound gorilla in the room is made of paper. The average American consumes more than 700 pounds of paper a year, anyway -- that's the world's highest per capita figure.
Here are 15 more facts about the environmental impact of the paper industry.

• Forests store 50% of the world's terrestrial carbon. (In other words, they are awfully important "carbon sinks" that hold onto pollution that would otherwise lead to global warming.)
• Half the world's forests have already been cleared or burned, and 80% of what's left has been seriously degraded.
• 42% of the industrial wood harvest is used to make paper.
• The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector's carbon emissions.
• Paper accounts for 25% of landfill waste and one third of municipal landfill waste. (It’s a shame that a tree would end here like this.)
• Municipal landfills account for one third of human-related methane emissions (and methane is 23-times more potent a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide).
• If the United States cut office paper use by just 10% it would prevent the emission of 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases -- the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road.
• Compared to using virgin wood, paper made with banana and post consumer recycled content uses 44% less energy, produces 38% less greenhouse gas emissions, 41% less particulate emissions, 50% less wastewater, 49% less solid waste and -- of course -- 100% less wood.
• In 2003, only 48.3% of office paper was recovered for recycling.
• Recovered paper accounts for 37% of the U.S. pulp supply.
• Printing and writing papers use the least amount of recycled content -- just 6%. Tissues use the most, at 45%, and newsprint is not far behind, at 32%.
• Demand for recycled paper will exceed supply by 1.5 million tons of recycled pulp per year within 10 years.
• While the paper industry invests in new recycled newsprint and paper packaging plants in the developing world, almost none of the new printing and writing paper mills use recycled or post consumer content. (The thought of tree –free papers is still beyond them kind of compared to is there life on Mars)
• China, India and the rest of Asia are the fastest growing per-capita users of paper, but they still rank far behind Eastern Europe and Latin America (about 100 pounds per person per year), Australia (about 300 pounds per person per year) and Western Europe (more than 400 pounds per person per year).
Forestry practices are growing, with 50% of the paper product market share and 226 million acres. Now they have many certification programs that give them permission to cut trees in the name of forestry management. I want to know why do forest need to be managed in the first place and why are we cutting trees to make paper when there are so many other alternatives.

Americans use approximately 31.5 million tons of printing and writing paper each year, an amount requiring over 535 million trees and countless gallons of oil to produce. (the figure on oil used, you’d be embarrassed to know)

More paper products are now recovered than sent to landfills in the US, yet 65 percent of used printing and writing paper still ends up in the waste stream.

The pulp and paper industry ranks first in use of industrial process water, third in toxic chemical releases, and fourth in emissions of the air pollutants known to impair respiratory health.

Simple changes in our paper use and purchasing practices can help limit the depletion of forests and loss of habitat, reduce pollution and decrease the stress on our landfills.

Purchasing products that are chlorine-free and include post-consumer fibers will reduce the strain on natural resources, promote resource conservation and waste reduction, and minimize toxic emissions.

Please choose environmentally-friendly papers for your school and office needs, carefully read the labels know the sourcing