[haiku] Re: Reducing paper waste at conferences

Hi Nicholas,

2009/12/17 Nicholas Blachford <nicholas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi.
>
> Forgive me if this has been said already but
>
> If you want to be green you want to contribute as little CO2 into the 
> atmosphere as possible.
> Recycling uses energy and thus contributes CO2.  So what would be better 
> would be to do something that actively removes CO2 from the atmosphere such 
> as using... trees.
>
> So, specifying non-recycled paper is actually the greenest option as it 
> removes the most CO2...
>
> It seems counter intuitive but you actually want to use as much paper as 
> possible!

Wow, you almost had me here. I even googled for it!

Note that the source below is unchecked so feel free to do that yourself.

http://www.id2.ca/downloads/eco-design-paper-facts.pdf

"Recycling paper uses 60% less energy than
manufacturing virgin timber paper."
Source: "1996 Statistics, Data Through 1995." American Forest and Paper
Association. November 1996. Pg. 2

Aso, and this might sound counter-counter intuitive, but while a tree
removes CO2 from the atmosphere, it is in fact an intermediate
carrier, a storage for CO2 (not technically correct, but hey, we're
generalizing). It is only good as long as it is a tree. Since less
than half the paper is recycled, and thus we can only guess that the
other half will be incinerated during waste disposal, thus dumping all
that stored CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if you assume that every cut
tree is replanted (and as such CO2 neutral) - which I doubt -  you are
still looking at the higher energy costs to produce paper versus
recycling paper.

So  you can definitely not use as much paper as you want!

N>

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