“How many trees are required for just one ton of paper…?”

In my recent research of some of the 96 paper mills in the Southern U.S., I found a report showing that one mill of particular interest produces over 876,000 tons of paper per year. So I had to ask myself, “How many trees are required for just one ton of paper?” Groups have estimated that using one ton of recycled paper could save 17 trees. (Not to mention the 380 gallons of oil, the three cubic yards of landfill space, the 4000 kilowatts of energy, and the 7000 galloons of water that would be saved by using one ton of recycled paper rather than virgin fiber.)

I found that a definitive answer, though, depends on the type of paper being produced and the types of trees being used. Obviously trees differ in girth, height, age, type, and usability. Since most large trees are used for lumber, tress larger than 8 inches in diameter are typically not used for paper. Most papers are a mixture of both hard and soft woods and some of the “trees” used are just chips and sawdust or pre-consumer recycled fibers that never make it out of the paper mill.

Typically one ton of uncoated, virgin, printing and office paper uses 24 trees while one ton of coated, lower-end, virgin magazine paper used for newsmagazines and most catalogs use just under 8 trees. To put this into perspective, one ream of paper containing 500 sheets uses 6% of the “average” tree and many businesses and schools run through multiple reams in one day.

So a pallet holding 40 containers, each with 10 reams of copy paper weighs one ton. About 24 trees are needed to produce just one pallet. With 30% post-consumer recycled paper, however, 7.2 trees are saved and 50% post-consumer recycled content would save 12 trees per one ton of copy paper produced. (Simply multiply the percentage of recycled paper to the number of trees estimated to be necessary for production of that paper type.) Just imagine the forest that could be saved if the packaging industry reverted to recycled materials!

If you would like to learn easy ways to decrease your paper consumption, visit http://shrinkpaper.org/ and take the pledge. Shrink is a new collaboration of over 50 different European NGOs addressing the problem of over-consumption as it relates to paper.

 

For further information see: http://members.aol.com/ramola15/funfacts.html, http://www.conservatree.com/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml, http://www.tappi.org/paperu/all_about_paper/earth_answers/EarthAnswers_HowMuch.pdf