2<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe takeaway point from this section of The State of the Paper Industry <\/em>report is that paper is bad, bad, bad. That simply isn’t true, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the report was written.<\/p>\nCurrently, 37% of U.S. pulp and nearly 25% of Canadian pulp is produced from recovered paper. However, the use of recycled content varies widely among grades of paper, from an average of 45% recycled content in tissue products and 32% in newsprint to a low of 6% in printing and writing papers. Estimates by environmental groups and paper industry pulp producers suggest that as much as 1.5 million additional tons of recycled pulp per year is needed to meet projected new demand for recycled paper in the United States within the next five to ten years. But as demand increases, will there be enough supply? One encouraging trend is that paper recovery has increased every year over the past five years and in 2006 exceeded 53%.<\/em><\/p>\nI’m confused. Is the 6% of “recycled” content in our printing and writing papers really recycled? Or is it recovered? In this paragraph, the terms recycling<\/em> and recovery<\/em> seem to be used interchangeably. But when we talk about “recycled content,” we’re talking about mixed office waste \u2014 paper recovered from the consumer stream. When we talk about “recovered” paper, we’re generally talking about printing waste recovered at production facilities.<\/p>\nMixing data on “recycled” paper and “recovered” paper streams is unhelpful because the collection and production costs, issues, and carbon footprints for both are different. Not to mention that, in the report, the section on old-growth forests and paper recovery flow from one to the other as if they are related and being faced by the paper industry everywhere.<\/p>\n
I am not a heckler. I am not a nitpicker. I care about the environment. In fact, I care about it too much to accept when even well-meaning agendas get in the way. Sensationalizing, skewing, and demonizing may get the base riled up, but I can’t see it as the path to meaningful and helpful dialog \u2014 or change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just downloaded The State of the Paper Industry: Monitoring the Indicators of Environmental Performance, put out by the Steering Committee of the Environmental Paper Network. On the surface, the numbers sound impressive and scary. The big bad paper industry needs to be reigned in for the good of the planet. Old growth forests are 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Tolliver-Walker","author_link":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/author\/htollvr\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"I just downloaded The State of the Paper Industry: Monitoring the Indicators of Environmental Performance, put out by the Steering Committee of the Environmental Paper Network. On the surface, the numbers sound impressive and scary. The big bad paper industry needs to be reigned in for the good of the planet. Old growth forests are…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6102"},{"taxonomy":"adace-sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inspiredeconomist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/adace-sponsor?post=6102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}