Newsletter of the Circle of Life Foundation founded by Julia Butterfly Hill
Every day, we are losing more of our global forests to the production of pulp and paper products. In fact, over 78% of the world's original native forests have already been logged or severely degraded. And many of these products-office paper, post-it pads, paper towels, napkins, etc.-are used once and thrown away, ending up in our Landfills that are currently composed of 40-50% paper products.
The pulp and paper industry is the largest industrial wood consumer in the U.S. and in the world. Pulp mills in the United States consume more than 12,000 square miles of forest each year; more than 40% of all trees logged are used for paper production. The plundering of forests by the timber industry has severe ecological consequences for the nation and the world: loss of wildlife and habitat; degradation of riparian ecosystems; increase in global warming; pollution of air and water; and disruption of local communities and economies.
The U.S. consumes nearly 30% of the world's consumption of paper-close to 90 million metric tons out of a total global appetite of nearly 300 million metric tons. The U.S. also tips the scale with the highest per capital consumption of paper-over 735 pounds of paper per year.
Despite the widespread availability of agricultural residues and other non-wood fiber alternatives for manufacturing pulp for the paper industry, total domestic paper production uses virgin wood for almost 70% of its total fiber input. Only one percent of all of the paper produced for U.S. consumers uses non-wood fibers. With global fiber demand expected to increase yet another 32% by the year 2010, experts are wondering just where the material will come from. While we must focus on paper-use reduction strategies to limit paper production, the reality is, paper will continue to need fiber.
Reducing paper consumption levels through reduction, reuse and recycling strategies is crucial to preserving our forests. However, we have yet to succeed in adequately protecting domestic forests. It is critical that we stimulate public demand for tree-free fiber- papers and support the development of a non-wood pulping industry in order to slow the destruction of our global forests being logged for wood-based paper production.
Paper made without trees is not a new concept. In fact, it is as ancient as paper itself: throughout history, paper was made exclusively from non-wood plant fibers. Even today, straw is the most common non-wood fiber, with its use predominating in China, India and other Asian countries. Only in the past century has wpod become a raw material for papermaking, because traditional raw materials, cotton and linen rags, were no longer available in sufficient supply to meet increasing demand for paper.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service has spent 40 years investigating more than 500 plants to find the best fiber for pulping paper, in place of wood. While hemp has historically been the most recognized plant for tree-free paper, the USDA has identified another plant, kenaf, as the most viable (and legal) fiber to produce tree-free paper.
Numerous agri-fibers are ideally suited for paper production, including kenaf, hemp, agricultural residues (such as cereal straw, sugarcane bagasse, cotton Linters, corn stover, etc.), reclaimed fabrics and
even recovered currency. Most of these fibers yield more pulp per acre than forests or tree farms, and require fewer pesticides and herbicides. In addition, because they contain less lignin, fewer chemicals and less time and energy are needed to pulp them. Moreover, due to their inherently light color, agri-fibers can be effectively brightened using totally chlorine-free (TCF) bleaching processes, eliminating the production of highly toxic chlorine by-products such as dioxin. Annual crops like hemp and kenaf also provide a means of adding strength to recycled fibers without using wood to produce recycled paper and paper products.
Ag-residues are a particularly beneficial raw material for papermaking as they are a co-product of agricultural production, require no additional land, and are currently available in large quantities at low prices. Cereal straw is available in almost all of the 48 contiguous U.S. states. Harvesting ag-residues for use in papermaking helps farmers avoid polluting the air and violating regional burning phase-downs (from burning straw) or paying for disposal. However, ag-residues and other annual crops are generally higher in silica-containing ash and other extraneous materials than wood, causing difficulties both in processing and in chemical recovery. Ag-residues present another challenge as they are less dense than wood and usually harvested only once a year, which leads to high handling, transportation and storage costs for this bulky material. Recently, however, advanced methods for collecting, baling and storing ag-residues have significantly improved the economics of straw utilization.
Non-wood paper is currently more expensive than virgin-wood paper due to industry start-up costs, smaller economies of scale, and heavy government subsidies of the traditional pulp, paper and timber industries. Government regulatory and procurement policies and subsidy programs have encouraged growth of these industries and their irresponsible ways by making polluting and forest destruction the most inexpensive ways to operate. This situation has instituted an uneven competitive climate, skewed towards highly destructive virgin wood-based paper production and consumption.
Shifting towards agricultural fiber sources offers a tremendous opportunity to diversify the paper industry's reliance on trees and forests for paper fibers while reducing the pollution associated with wood-based pulping processes, and providing an economically feasible means of disposing of agricultural residues other than burning. It also stimulates new economic activity in rural communities. Of course, by substituting non-wood fibers for wood, we can also significantly reduce the number of trees clear-cut for paper, thereby helping to preserve our forest heritage for generations to come.
For more information on non-wood and alternative fiber papers, paper reduction, paper use efficiency and other ecological pulp & paper issues, please view our website at: http://www.rethinkpaper.org or contact: Nancy Hurwitz, ReThink Paper, rtp@earthisland.org , (503) 668-5123.
If you are interested in locating tree-free and 100% post-consumer recycled paper products, please contact Fiber Options Paper at (888) 290-1919 or check out their limited on-line store catalog at: http://www.enaturalmall.com/FIBEROPTIONS
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