If you're not keen on tree-based paper, or even recycled paper made from trees, there are plenty of alternatives in market - but you'll still need to hunt around.

Approximately one out of every three trees harvested today ends up as pulp for paper products and unfortunately trees from old growth forests are still often felled to meet the demand.

The United States has under five percent of the world's population, yet consumes more than thirty percent of the world's paper.

Consumers Beware

98% of Products Are Committing the 7 Sins of Greenwashing
Wouldn’t it be nice if all the green claims made for green products were true? It would be nice, but it wouldn’t be true. What is true is that consumers have to be skeptical of all the environmental claims, and practice smart and savvy shopping. This is especially true for baby products, recycled paper, kids toys, cosmetics, and cleaning products—where the false claims run most rampant.

How many trees are one ton of recycled paper?

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.

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?

“By protecting nature’s resources, we help preserve an inexhaustible storehouse of riches. We restore and improve as we preserve nature’s abundance.”

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.

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:

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…

"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.

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.

Current methods of making paper are still cutting down to many trees using toxins, wasting water and energy, and are terribly unsustainable.

Recycling only goes so far; what's needed is an alternative method of making paper that is less harmful to begin with. We have that alternative: Banana Paper and our other ago-waste papers such as Coffee Paper, Lemon Paper and Mango paper
To retain optimal performance for an environmentally friendly but highly sustainable paper production industry one must include: 1) Renewable raw materials: preferably a non-seasonal secondary fiber crop which makes the Banana a great source as it grows continually all year round.

Would like to share an article written I this morning want to give ecothanks to Gerald for his support over the years and his endless efforts on environmental paper education. His a Environmental Paper Consultant with over 20 years experience.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2007
By Gerard Gleason
The Lowdown on Tree-Free Paper
Every week I get several calls or e-mails about hemp paper…but considering the number of calls I get, actual interest in creating a market for such a product seems to involve more smoke than a Cheech & Chong movie.

I’m often referred to as the Banana Paper Guy, since 1995 when Ian, Alvaro
and I created the company we have been making Banana paper and notebooks
ever since. I have created and made these great natural banana paper and
notebooks for you all to enjoy and also help enlighten people to the
alternatives to what is available, its a shame that most of the companies in
the industry use green rhetoric such as recycled paper to deceive consumers
into thinking the companies products are either good for the environment or
didn’t harm it in production. When that simply is not the case, remember in
the paper industry the word recycled doesn’t mean anything. For example
companies use virgin pulp to create a product, the various size scraps and

While visiting the San Diego zoo our banana paper was spotted. Thanks Natalie for submitted this great photo, the banana paper adventures continues.

[img_assist|nid=224|Zoo|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=432|height=324]