Reduce Your Paper Use
Reducing the amount of paper is pretty easy. Far easier than you think.
Mom relayed a story to me of her youth. It seems their pig loved toilet paper. LOVED toilet paper. Well, once her mother figured out what was happening with all of the toilet paper, the kids were told (Mom and her cousins), they could use the toilet paper for themselves, or feed it to the pig and use the Sears catalog.
The pig didn't get anymore toilet paper.
See how easy that is?
For this post, I'm not going to give suggestions to you about how to reduce. You already know how. What you may not know is why it's so important to reduce. That's what I'll be focusing on.
Each person in the US produces 730 pounds of waste paper per year.
Every year, 535 million trees are cut just for the US paper demand, using over 12 billion gallons of petroleum products.
Making 1 ton of paper from virgin pulp uses up to 72,000 gallons of water, whereas producing recycled paper only needs a tenth the water, 60% of the energy and not even 50% the chemicals.
Americans recycle only 1/3 of the newspapers they purchase.
The average American gets 400 pounds of mail order catalogs every year.
Americans use over 50 pounds of tissue products per year. Tissues, toilet paper, paper towels and packaging encompass this category.
If every American replaced 1 package of regular TP with one of recycled paper, it would save 1.4 million trees. With napkins, it would be another 1 million trees.
Since 1960, office paper generation increased by 4.8 million tons, or 320 percent
And some good news - However, office paper generation has declined by 750,000 tons during the last six years as the use of personal computers has spread.
15 million sheets of paper are used in US offices every 5 minutes.
Here's a picture from Chris Jordan depicting the 15 million sheets of paper:
And a detail:
Mom relayed a story to me of her youth. It seems their pig loved toilet paper. LOVED toilet paper. Well, once her mother figured out what was happening with all of the toilet paper, the kids were told (Mom and her cousins), they could use the toilet paper for themselves, or feed it to the pig and use the Sears catalog.
The pig didn't get anymore toilet paper.
See how easy that is?
For this post, I'm not going to give suggestions to you about how to reduce. You already know how. What you may not know is why it's so important to reduce. That's what I'll be focusing on.
Each person in the US produces 730 pounds of waste paper per year.
Every year, 535 million trees are cut just for the US paper demand, using over 12 billion gallons of petroleum products.
Making 1 ton of paper from virgin pulp uses up to 72,000 gallons of water, whereas producing recycled paper only needs a tenth the water, 60% of the energy and not even 50% the chemicals.
Americans recycle only 1/3 of the newspapers they purchase.
The average American gets 400 pounds of mail order catalogs every year.
Americans use over 50 pounds of tissue products per year. Tissues, toilet paper, paper towels and packaging encompass this category.
If every American replaced 1 package of regular TP with one of recycled paper, it would save 1.4 million trees. With napkins, it would be another 1 million trees.
Since 1960, office paper generation increased by 4.8 million tons, or 320 percent
And some good news - However, office paper generation has declined by 750,000 tons during the last six years as the use of personal computers has spread.
15 million sheets of paper are used in US offices every 5 minutes.
Here's a picture from Chris Jordan depicting the 15 million sheets of paper:
And a detail:
Labels: article, Conserve, paper facts, recycle
posted by Leslie at
8:28 PM
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