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”