"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.