The Real Cost of Paper
Is the Cost of Consumerism People of the Future are willing to Pay?
This article may have a lot to do with my horrible handwriting and preference to take digital notes or the fact that I like to take all my notes/ideas/reference material along in my pocket and hate lugging around volumes of my favorite articles and books. Either case I got to seriously think about Paper and the seemingly careless/endless use of it all. Living in Hong Kong recently, one can see the senseless distribution of flyers on the street by either students or old people with no commercial skills. Folks would sometimes take a sheet or 3 out of curiosity and then throw it in the bins. What kind of Country creates opportunities for low cost labor? In an upcoming blog, I will discuss why Hong Kong is slow to take up digital.
Back to paper … I recall reading about processes involved in Bleaching paper. The cost of making white paper has a damaging effect on the environment. When I started telling clients and friends that I am paper averse, they thought I was being eccentric/funny and yes sometimes, I am. However I have personal reasons for avoiding taking physical notes and/or printing anything. To be frank, I do use paper but jokingly, this is when there is no option but to … like when one goes to the bathroom. Toilet humor aside, paper is as old as time and one of the causes to our climate challenges and environmental issues. A problem that can be remedied with existing resources if one takes time to plan things out.
Let’s take a step back and give honor and credit to something that has had since the dawn of times, been instrumental in the development of our early civilizations and to the transmission and furthering of knowledge. Ancient Egyptians used a writing material called papyrus by beating strips of papyrus plants. However, my Ancestors in China invented many things like the Compass and Gun Powder as well as paper around the start of the 1st or 2nd Century by the Han Court’s, Eunuch Cai Lun. It is told that Paper made its way to the Middle East to Europe where the manufacturing was mechanized in the 19th century.
Whilst paper did make it easy for people to store information and exchange it such that other would in turn add to that collection of data when coming up with new ideas and processes, we entered the world of Personal Computing only a few decades ago. Here what this allowed and yet as you will see towards the end of this article that we have a long way to go … I will say it now and outright – paper is way too cheap and that is the cause of many of our environmental problems of today and tomorrow. Same goes for Coal and Petrol … whilst essential for our current energy needs, has serious consequences to our environment. What is the incentive to explore and adopt proven energy sources like Solar and Nuclear when much needed power and energy is cheap and much needed in developing and developed countries? The cost per Kilowatt is still way too high and higher than coal powered energy creation. Coal powered electricity generation runs at 4 Cents per kilowatt and the fuel itself is abundant. When clean coal is more expensive, wind costs even more and solar runs at 12+ cents per kilowatt, it starts to look like alternative energy is a nice to have rather than a must have, yet.
Back to the humble sheet of paper for the meantime … with the advent of Word processing, one did no longer have to retype endless sheets of paper and/or liquid paper mistakes away to get it right. This allowed us to save paper and manage our resources more effectively. I am old enough to remember days when I used my Dad’s mechanical typewriter and from there an electric one that I bought in my late teens.
Before the advent of emails however, we still had to print our communications/messages/letters on paper. This meant more papers being printed. When the Web 1.0 came about and the internet enabled the electronic storage and sharing of information, less paper was used, which is great. And yet this is not enough.
Books are still being printed, folks are still using books as the main repository of knowledge to study in schools and newspapers are also being printed, read once and discarded. Food is wrapped in paper and in Hong Kong especially, flyers promoting all sorts of stuff is handed on the streets by students and old people alike. All that paper goes to landfills and/or burnt at incinerators.
Not much recycling goes on in Asia that I can see. Whereas in Australia where I lived, we had 4 bins: one for rubbish, one for glass (beer/wine bottles mostly), one for plastic bottles and one for paper and paper based containers. The vast majority of people living in developing and developed countries do not have the opportunity to recycle even if they wanted to. Once more, all that rubbish goes to landfills and we do not have infinite land to fill. Burning rubbish has an enormous cost to the air quality and to damaging our environment by fuelling global warning via the emission on Carbon Dioxide. The chemicals released in burning rubbish which may contain plastics and toxins can’t be good for our Ozone layer … yes that layer of air made of Oxygen 3 that protects us from Ultra Violet Radiation. Finally what about those children living close to Incinerators like in China where there is a school next to an Incinerator. Most of the children were found to have lead in their blood. Lead is a poison.
Incinerating can’t be sensible fix-all solution to the amount of rubbish we create. Have you ever thought of the amount of stuff you throw out in a year-month-day? Do you sometimes wonder as I do everyday as to where it all goes? Landfilled, burnt or dumped?
With more countries evolving from under-developed into developing and finally developed countries, there is an awful lot of demand for paper and resources in general. Those natural and artificial goods need to be manufactured and this takes energy that comes from coal powered generation of electricity. The making of those products create damaging by-products such as the bleach used in making white paper. Once those goods and products are used they become rubbish which then is burnt and or landfills. Both have problems which we touched on before. We are still focusing on paper … what about all the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
A few Facts about how Paper is consumed today.
[All Sources/Statements in Quotes below references Wikipedia and the North American Factbook]
- “Let’s now look at developed leading nations like the USA where in 2001 the average person used 700 pounds (320 kg) of paper per annum. Globally and on average, it was 110 pounds (50 kg). “
- “It is also estimated that 95% of business information is paper based and currently communications has now been replaced by packaging as the single largest category of paper use at 41% of all paper used”
- “115 billion sheets of paper are used annually for personal computers [Source: Worldwatch Institute]. The average daily web user prints 28 pages daily [Source: Gartner group and HP]”
- “Most corrugated fiberboard boxes have over 25% recycled fibers. Some are 100% recycled fiber.”
- “Recycling 1 short ton (0.91 t) of paper saves 17 mature trees, 7 thousand US gallons (26 m3) of water, 3 cubic yards (2.3 m3) of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil (84 US gal or 320 l), and 4,100 kilowatt-hours (15 GJ) of electricity — enough energy to power the average American home for six months”
Recycling is most welcome and will have a positive impact. Is it the ultimate solution to all our problems? Looking at the statement below where it is claimed that recycling causes 35% less pollution, I read that recycling still does create pollution … just less. It that good enough considering our Global demands for Paper products is rising at a massive rate? Clearly we need to ask the following – What is the bottom Line?
“The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found that recycling causes 35% less water pollution and 74% less air pollution than making virgin paper.[18] Pulp mills can be sources of both air and water pollution, especially if they are producing bleached pulp. Modern mills produce considerably less pollution than those of a few decades ago. Recycling paper decreases the demand for virgin pulp and thus reduces the overall amount of air and water pollution associated with paper manufacture. Recycled pulp can be bleached with the same chemicals used to bleach virgin pulp, but hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydrosulfite are the most common bleaching agents. Recycled pulp, or paper made from it, is known as PCF (process chlorine free) if no chlorine-containing compounds were used in the recycling process.[19] However it should be noted that recycling mills may have polluting by-products, such as sludge. De-inking at Cross Pointe’s Miami, Ohio mill results in sludge weighing 22% of the weight of wastepaper recycled.”
What is Chemical pulping and what about it?
“The purpose of a chemical pulping process is to break down the chemical structure of lignin and render it soluble in the cooking liquor, so that it may be washed from the cellulose fibers. Because lignin holds the plant cells together, chemical pulping frees the fibres and makes pulp. The pulp can also be bleached to produce white paper for printing, painting and writing. Chemical pulps tend to cost more than mechanical pulps, largely due to the low yield, 40–50% of the original wood. Since the process preserves fibre length, however, chemical pulps tend to make stronger paper. Another advantage of chemical pulping is that the majority of the heat and electricity needed to run the process is produced by burning the lignin removed during pulping. Papers made from chemical wood-based pulps are also known as woodfree papers.”
Bleaching as you can see in the extract above can add to the environmental cost/problem. Once I did this research and understood the significance of the over abundant and yet humble piece of paper, I will never look and think of it again the same way. By the way, no I have not yet turned into a hippie … what I am now aware of however has altered for ever my thoughts, decisions and practices, going forward. It makes me think longer about what I buy and what I throw away if/when I am unable to recycle or donate.
My personal solution to minimising Paper consumption is as you might remember to do with using as much of the Digital resources available as I can. As such I tend to use Tasks lists in Outlook rather than a physical to do list. I write all my meeting notes in notepad or Personal Notes on my iPhone, log Voice memos instead of jotting it down on paper. I set up reminders and such on my Lappy or mobile phones – BB and iPhone. Download movies, music on iTunes instead of buying a CD/DVD, use a Bidet instead of you know what J
I do hope this article makes you also think about your own consumption of paper and other consumer goods. Those are after all my opinions but rest assured that they are referencing material wither from Government quotes as available through the public domain to Resource ideas and is my attempt in this blog to be as factual and less opiniated as I have been in other blog posts.
Cheers,
Dan
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