When I was a teacher I was always complaining to students about the amount of paper they waste. By the time they'd printed work a few times, used worksheets, exam papers, made a few paper airplanes and got newsletters they must have been well on the way to using the average office worker's 10,000 sheets per year.
Paper is environmentally expensive to produce and most people are not aware of its effect on the environment.
So let's look at this on a 'per sheet' basis ; (standard copy paper).
- Each sheet weighs about 5 grams
- Just over 15 grams of wood are used to make it.
- For each sheet 5 grams of sludge is produced which has to be disposed of.
- To make each sheet requires 200 KJ of energy of which 95 KJ are bought in as coal/gas/oil or electricity.
- Each sheet produces 12.9 grams of carbon dioxide during its manufacture, transport and eventual disposal by decomposition or burning.
- Each sheet used adds 6.1 grams of carbon dioxide to global warming (the remaining 6.8 g is used by the trees grown for the next sheet).
- Each sheet of paper produces 0.06 gram of sulphur dioxide and 0.04 grams of nitrogen dioxide in its manufacture. Both cause acid rain.
- Each sheet adds a tiny amount of nasties such as dioxin to the environment.
- Recycling means less trees are cut down but does not significantly affect the amount of undesirable gases produced due to its reprocessing costs.
- White recycled paper adds a disastrous amount of bleach and sludge to the environment. The ONLY sensible way to recycle paper is to use it for unbleached cardboard. I've seen 'recycled' toilet paper. Hopefully that should be 'toilet paper made from recycled paper' but somehow, recycled brown toilet paper just doesn't appeal. And NEVER use brown paper in place of the paper you use for cooking - those nasties will get into your food!
- 61 Kg of CO2 to global warming
- Using enough water to fill a small swimming pool
- producing about 130 Kg of acid rain causing gas.
- adding 45 grams of 'nasties' to the environment
