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Plastic requires petroleum to make,

Actually, plastic can also be made from hemp. Just saying.

It doesn't change the fact that they are over-felling in the first place... hardwood is extremely energy inefficient and requires toxins to process into paper. While it's good that they are actually recycling one of timbers by-products, but they are still ignoring other easier and more efficient (read: harder to monopolize)hardwood substitutes.

Hardwood is 20-40% cellulose while Hemp is over 70% cellulose.

If this isn't enough, consider the lifespan of hardwood vs. hemp. Hardwood takes tens of years to mature, while the turnaround for hemp is every few months. One acre of hemp produces as much usable material as SEVEN acres of timber.

In addition to paper, hemp can also be used to make biodegradable plastic and has been done for over 50 years. Why is the government so restrictive of a plant with so many clear benefits?

errr ... don't laugh. That exists : http://www.hempplastic.com/

once W. is gone and the tax cuts for ethanol is rolled out (please), then realism will take hold of corn, and we will see corn being used in plastics.

Even with the massive subsidies corn gets corn prices will still go up. A better feed stock for plastic is hemp. But how well will Bioplastics work for fiber?

Compared to other North American crops, such as corn or switchgrass, HEMP contains the highest percentage of cellulose.

This is yet another reason to re-legalize industrial hemp in the US.

This great annual crop, grows in even the most arid lands, virtually anywhere in North America, without the use of pesticides, or herbicides, and can be baled like hay for easy transportation. It can be used to make:

• paper
• rope
• building material
• ethanol
• methanol
• bio-diesel
• hemp-seed oil
• hemp can also be made into plastic.

Why is this crop illegal in the USA? Oh yeah, because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death. HEMP is NOT marijuana! You cannot get high from smoking hemp!

Flamebait? I think the mods are the ones smoking the stuff, sheesh. Someone revoke that moderators privileges, total abuse there.

Poster was actually completely on topic...though obviously too stoned to remember to provide any reasonable details. Maybe they'll fill in the blanks when they come down ;)

Links:
http://www.hempplastic.com/
http://www.treehugger.com/

http://www.hempmuseum.org/

Just for starters.

Was plastic a big industry in 1937?

Typically, this is the kind of question I like to ask google.

By the 1930s, plastic was being applied to an increasingly diverse family of innovative, modern materials that were soft and easily molded at some point in their creation, making them capable of being cut, extruded, molded, or otherwise worked into a tremendous variety of shapes and forms.

Though the origins of modern plastics are humble, since the 1930s early inventors have been all but canonized--even during their lifetimes--and their discoveries now have the aura of legends.

(http://www.oldhousejournal.com/magazine/2005/apr/ fantastic.shtml)

Bakelite first came to prominence in the 1930s, you can look up more about that, too.

But anyway, no, it wasn't a big industry yet, and it would have taken a very different form if hemp had not fallen by the wayside. You could read about henry ford's plastic car for example, although it mostly used hemp filler. Nonetheless, hemp can be made into quite an array of plastics.

i sewed a custom psp cotton case for mine, drop it all the time its good, but i shouldn't need to do that..
i got a sony digital cam for me mate and a drunken friend slightly nicked the lens shell on a table now at times it takes blurry shots..
im all for classic technology i still use 35mm im so sick of todays fuckin recyclable technology.. makes me really pissed off
never falling for it again.. any company unless i can acquire it for free as i usually do

for that price the blu-ray discs better be made of hemp plastic...
and the entire ps3 for that mater

http://www.hempplastic.com/newSite/

hemp plastics strength is comparable to steel if not stronger..

in a few years once it catches on as it being an almost indestructible plastic compared to petro plastics companies will be fighting to keep their energy in-efficient dinosaur method of world destruction alive...

remember when companies competed to have the strongest lightest most water resistant personal audio cassette players?
i skateboard with my sony tape deck fall on it drop it etc and still works perfectly 10+ years now

at the least, i like what ibm did with magnetic tapes recently, vastly increasing its storage capacity/updating them to todays standards, but still using petro plastics for the parts.. not good.

Or, how did we make plastic before we made it out of oil.

You don't need oil to make plastics. Henry Ford made a plastic shell for a car back in the 1940's.

Oh by the way you can also make Bio-Diesel from Hemp. So what is the real reson this plant is illegal? You can't smoke hemp. At one time hemp was the nations number 1 cash crop, even bigger than King Cotton. I find it interesting that hemp is illegal just because it resembles a marijuana plant.