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Paper Manufacturer Launches "Print More" Campaign
innocent_white_lamb writes "Domtar, a major North American paper manufacturer, has launched an advertising campaign to encourage people to print more documents on paper. Domtar CEO John Williams opposes campaigns by other companies asking employees to be responsible with what they print. 'Young people really are not printers. When was the last time your children demanded a printer?' Mr. Williams said ... 'We've got to do some work about having them believe and feel that printing isn't a sort of environmental negative.' The industry expects that, absent this campaign, paper demand will decrease by 4% annually. Williams's comments did not go down well in some environmental circles."
Oh, he knows its an environmental negative. But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
And this is why capitalism* has failed.
* as practiced today through the legal construct of a corporation
.
It is an environmental problem because natural forests are ruined to grow different kinds of trees which are easier to transform into paper. This is also an environmental problem because the paper industry uses and certainely rejects a lot of chemical products in order for your paper to be white (mostly).
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Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
last i checked paper was made from the waste from milling timber from sustainably managed forests as well as recycled sources.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
May be... still uses a fuckton of bleach and other processing chemicals to get that nice shiny white color.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
From a 2006 NYT article:
. . .
The most harmful part of the process is paper production. Breaking down wood fiber to make paper consumes a lot of energy, which in many cases comes from coal plants.
...environmentalists are just too stupid to recognize that paper is a carbon dioxide SINK
Redo.
Read this analysis of the lifecycle carbon cost of paper by a paper company. The bottom line is is an estimated cost of 1.81 tons CO2-equivalent impact per ton of paper (see paper for details).
Paper appears to be the opposite of a carbon sink.
...similarly, environmentalists are doubly too stupid to realize that once you factor in the energy saved in harvesting, transporting, milling, packaging, re-transporting, storing, re-re-transporting, retailing, and re-re-re-transporting a ream of paper, you've created over eleventeen jerbs. Jerbs that environmentalists would have took! My god, they're so blingingly stupid!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_benefit
Why do environmental groups get upset by paper? Paper is a very renewable resource. Trees get cut down, and grow back. When I'm done with it, it rots (I happen to compost mine). With this computer I'm typing on, rare metals had to be mined to make it, and when I'm done with it, it sits around for at least a few thousand years (or more?). I have no problem with paper.
Chiefly, it's the chemicals used in processing pulp and the resulting pollution. Ever live near a paper mill? Even after the reforms thirty years ago, it's still a pretty nasty business. Secondarily, a fairly large amount of energy is involved in the harvesting, chipping, and transport of wood chips to the mills. (The mills themselves are actually very energy-efficient, deriving a significant amount of their power from burning the waste wood products, which is basically carbon-neutral.) Then there's the energy involved in transporting the paper products and toxic compounds in a lot of the inks used, as well as the highly toxic solvents used in cleaning and maintaining large-scale printing presses -- for which reason brownfield sites formerly used for printing are quite cheap, if you can afford the necessary cleanup and remediation, anyway.
As with anything else, it is best not to be wasteful and to remember that, for practically any consumer good, a considerable amount of energy was consumed to bring it to you, along with (most likely) a non-trivial amount of pollution. Use more is almost always bad advice.
That said, your point about the manufacture (and disposal) of electronic hardware is spot-on. The paper industry is squeaky clean by comparison.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
For fucks sake: THERE IS NO SUCH LAW!
If that were so, every dot-com era CEO would be in steel cages right now. And that is demonstrably NOT so.
Christ- you should be using a laser printer. No wonder.
Printing requires a certain overhead cost. Once that overhead cost is met, the cost of printing drops dramatically. But for many years my printing threshold has been far below that overhead cost.
See, to print, you have to have a printer. I'm often mobile; I sure don't want to carry another 15 pound device plus supplies. And printing is unreliable. Ink cartridges are expensive, and prone to drying out and frequent replacement and the associated trip to the office supplies store. Printing is SLOW. You have to set up drivers, you have to plug stuff in, you have to dicker with drivers and print queues when paper doesn't feed properly. Printing over a network is a pain. You have to have drivers for the network printer, and you have to spend anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes setting it all up in the first place.
And then, when you are done, you have a document in your hand. You can't instantly send it *anywhere* save by digitizing it. (EG: faxing, or scan/email) Sure, you might need a signature on it, but once it's digitized, a signature is easily pasted on the document in its original (soft copy) format anyway.
So, why did you do all that, again?
And then there's quality! When I print, it's highly likely to be because I'm making a presentation. To produce *nice* high quality prints, you need a nice, high quality printer, preferably color. For somebody for whom a ream lasts for at least a year, it's hard to justify spending hundreds of dollars in order to print on $5 of paper. So I find that it's easier and cheaper to print to PDF and then email it that to the local Kinko's or other store. I get the best quality prints in color, on demand, without dickering with drivers, and just having to drive about 1/4 mile to get it, on the one or two days in a quarter I might need it. Queue it up around lunch, and it's a quick stop on the way back with my sammich.
I could go on with faxes - receiving faxes with a "fax machine" has a slew of problems. If your paper jams, your fax is hosed. Since the fax may well be a contract worth many thousands of dollars, this is a non-starter. Also, paper faxes can be lost. They can't be reprinted without the original. They aren't automatically archived for later review. They can't be easily viewed in a remote office without being faxed again, along with the problems of quality degradation, etc.
But soft-copy faxes carry NONE of these problems. Done right, a soft-copy fax system is redundant, multi-point, and accessible from anywhere with proper security authentication. We made this switch years ago, and never looked back!
Printing sucks. I do everything I can to eliminate paper!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Oh, he knows its an environmental negative. But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
You know, I've seen this tossed around on /. and other places for years now. And I'm going to call bullshit on it. The argument is that unless the CEO and the Board of Directors don't with Terminator like focus, do anything and everything to "maximize shareholder value" that they're going to have a shareholder revolt and lawsuit on their hands.
That simply isn't true. Let me point out something. Many large publicly traded companies have philanthropic arms. They donate money to the Red Cross, the United Way, all that stuff. That's a cost sink. Oh sure, there's someone that's going to say that these donations are not only tax write offs, but also double as advertising, but I don't know anyone that said, "Hey, Dairy Queen is raising money for the March of Dimes. Let's eat there." Direct advertising is much more effective.
If you follow this logic, you're arguing that corporations are duty bound to break the law, as long as the ill gotten gains outpace the fine. It's simple decision theory. If Prob(success | action-A) * Reward(success, action-A) + Prob(failure | action-A) > Prob(success | action-B) * Reward(success, action-B) + Prob(failure | action-B), then you should do action-A, whether it's save a family from a sinking battleship, or eat the still beating heart of an orphan.
But that's not the world we live in. If it was, you'd being seeing lawsuits every day. "ZOMG! He could have bought this for $5 less at CostCo instead of Sam's Club! LAWSUIT!" "LOL! He cut a business deal that wasn't aggressively priced enough! LAWSUIT!" Why don't you see this? Because you'd have to prove that the executives were acting in bad faith, and that simply isn't the case in vast majority of circumstances. Even in this situation, it's not acting in bad faith, if you refuse to lie. (Let the irony of the reverse the parent is arguing to sink in.)
Think about this too. We live in a country, where shareholder rights are infuriatingly weak. You probably couldn't even get a lawsuit started, and if you did I'm sure the Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy would simply say that you waited too long to sue or something equally stupid to ensure the status quo and the tyranny of haves over the have-nots.
There is no such requirement except in the delusions of people who need reasons to dislike capitalism. Don't like what the CEO is doing? Appoint a new board of directors who pushes for the agenda you want.
If a company is amoral than you know what that means? That the shareholders don't give a damn. They want their profit and that's it. The profit is very close to them while the ill effects are very far. Basic human nature ingrained by millions of years of evolution. The tribe over the hill doesn't have your genes so their deaths don't matter. Just like you don't really care about all the poor kids dying in Africa and so you're not donating all your money to helping them.
Hemp paper is available, but it's more far more expensive than paper from wood pulp.
When you add a boat or plane to the supply chain because it's totally illegal to grow in the USA, no shit it's more expensive
He is half kidding. Paper company plant quick growing trees and not these pesky maple tree, oak or any slow growing trees. And not only because they are quick to grow, but because they are quick to grow they are also of lesser density thus they are more easy to reduce to pulp to make paper.
But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
It's a lovely excuse, but legally unenforceable and a bit silly. How many executives have you seen dragged into court for not being ruthless enough? How would a judge even be able to determine whether an executive had "done the most he could", or not? The truth is, executives have pretty wide latitude to do what they want, and as long as they aren't blatantly defrauding the company, the law isn't going to touch them. Inefficient management is not illegal; if it was there would be few managers left.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of course, the computer you're on is the direct result of centuries of environment destroying progress that wouldn't have existed without capitalism. Actually you'd probably be dead without all the medical advanced it helped to come to pass. Granted, hypocrisy seems to be the staple of zealots.
Everything you said above is true, but none of it contradicts the parent poster's argument. Just because he's (arguably) a hypocrite doesn't mean he's not right.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Damn right. I recently helped a business reduce 60K in monthly paper costs. Just by purchasing a few thousand dollars worth of signature capture pads, configuring some terminal servers, and setting up some signing certs.
According to this gentleman up there in Canada, we were all motivated by misconceptions and our dire need to protect the horny spotted dwarf owl or something.....
It had nothing to do with the immediate savings of materials costs and long term savings of derived from increased worker productivity since they were not spending 5 minutes, printing, signing, and scanning.
Yep.... all about the environment over here.
shipping *products* is cheap, shipping heavy raw materials is expensive
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You are assuming most of the new paper made from virgin fiber remains intact. In fact, most of it will be disposed of: Either incinerated or stored in a landfill. Landfill storage turns out to be problematic: "Quantification of methane emissions from landfilled paper is still imprecise, but if it is included, at the least, the yield, measured in terms of CO2 equivalents, will be increased by a factor of 2.5 compared with the CO2 emitted during complete incineration." [Wood in Our Future: The Role of Life-Cycle Analysis: Proceedings of a Symposium (1997) ]
Either way, paper is a net contributor of greenhouse gasses. Also note the original reference I chose was from a "green" paper company. Estimates from environmental groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator, indicate far higher net CO2-equivalent impact - 5882 lb CO2 equivalent per ton of copy paper according to the EDF, a ton more than Verso's estimate.
What the fuck are you talking about? There are numerous problems with tree farms but the quality of wood is hardly one of them.
Last week I went down to Home Depot and got 20 feet of 4x8 with no knots in them whatsoever for a dollar less a foot than it was a year ago.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And then you haven't even mentioned the CO2 cost of producing/recycling paper, as well as transport to and from the consumer.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Don't know about bound by law, but certainly bound by shareholders who are self-interested. If you don't increase their net worth, they'll fire your ass and find someone who will.
Of course, this is predicated on a false market economy - the company doesn't bear all its external costs; society as a whole does. And that's the central dichotomy of the free market small government right wingers - they want to avoid the regulation that would rebalance the market to ensure that everyone does fairly bear all their own costs, and they want to avoid the taxes that would allow society to do so.
So far, that's been fine because the environment has been big enough to absorb the impacts without overall significant negative effects. But that isn't infinitely sustainable - we're living on our capital, not our revenue, and one day, it'll run out.
That's not true. Recycling paper uses far less water, less energy, and produces far less pollutants than paper from wood, and (modern) recycling paper doesn't do any damage to the printer. You are spreading the paper industry's lies. For the former, plenty of studies are linked on Wikipedia. For the latter -- I had never even heard the claim that recycling paper was bad for printers -- but anyway, I found a reference to a study done by the German federal institute for materials research which apparently isn't available online as well as references to a couple of large corporations that tracked the printer wearout when using different papers.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, regardless of the environmental cost, social need or greater economic benefit.
In what jurisdiction? Cite, please.
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (1919).
It is perhaps not the best citation (it's almost 100 years old and has been superseded somewhat). But it is so famous even I heard of it.
And of course that is just the paper itself.
There's also all the ink, toner, cartridges, drums etc that get manufactured, packaged, transported, stocked, sold etc. And printers themselves are getting more flimsy and disposable too. And then the power used by printing...
Yeah, printing sure is good for the environment.
Suppose you harvest an acre of hundred-year-old trees, and you plant three acres of trees. Next year, you harvest a second acre of hundred-year-old trees, and plant three more.
That's not how the paper industry works. They use tree farms of quick-growth species (another poster suggested that they can grow a usable tree in as little as 5 years). Hundred-year-old wood is too expensive to use for making paper, anyway.
Because, I hear you think, they can then also harvest the tetrahydrocannabinol-rich flowers and smoke themselves into a stupor.
Not so, unfortunately. First off, only the unfertilised flowers produce plenty of THC. This means you have to keep the male plants far away. Doable, there's even something called 'feminised' seeds, but still a bother.
A bigger hurdle, however, is that the smokey stuff is Cannabis Sativa. The stuff used to make paper, rope and other hemp products, is Cannabis Indica, which doesn't make a particularly good smoke.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
" But he is bound by law to do the most he can to improve sales and shareholder value, "
gaagh. will you stop it? all of you? that is such a misguided belief on /.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd suggest that the single largest sector of reduction has been from large companies streamlining their processes to replace paper with electrons, the latter is monumentally cheaper and more efficient to store (especially since it would likely be stored electronically anyway, effectively making it a sunk cost), transport, produce, reproduce, track, edit, distribute and dispose of.
My company used to get a lot of documents from our customers and then forward them to various government agencies. Those agencies required us to keep paper copies of the forms so that we could re-submit them if they ever lost the copies that we'd sent to them.
Eventually, our customers started submitting the information on the forms to us electronically. We'd fill them out, print the required copy for our records, and mail a copy to the gov't agencies.
After a while, the agencies went mostly paperless and allowed us to transmit the images of the completed forms electronically, but still mandated that we keep a paper copy - just in case.
Some time after that, cooler heads prevailed and decided it would be OK if we just kept electronic copies of the images of the completed forms.
Because the transition was so gradual from the original paper trail to the new all-electronic system, certain parts never got refactored. One day I walked through the scanning room and saw a giant stack of papers next to the scanner. As it turns out, the process of generating the forms for submission to the agencies included printing a copy of those forms. Then, an employee would feed that stack into our bulk scanners, view each page in a custom in-house app, read a number on the form to see what internal batch it belonged to, and enter that value into the program which would then file it away appropriately.
Well, a few hours later I'd shortened that to saving an image of each outbound form to the fileserver and skipped the print/scan/data-entry step altogether. That saved the company a few thousand dollars worth of paper each year, the costs of transporting, storing, and disposing of all the paper, and the wages of the data entry clerk (who was thrilled to move to something less soul-crushingly boring). Our friend at the paper mill might not see the benefits of the change, but my boss and coworkers were pretty darn happy with it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's a bit disingenuous, or more than quite a bit naive to suggest that 100+ year old hardwoods are sent to paper mills.
You obviously haven't visited Australia. It is routine here to clear-fell huge tracts of old-growth forest to supply the chip and pulp industry. In Western Australia, some attempt is made to hide it by leaving a band of intact trees between the cut and the road, but in Tasmania it is impossible to hide whole mountainsides of jagged stumps.
Sure, there are those of us who value and use high-grade timber such as you mentioned, but our interests are insignificant by comparison with those of the asswipes who, with the willing complicity of our governments are happily wiping out thousands of acres of old-growth forest.
Before you made this claim you might have benefited from a drive around British Columbia or eastern Washington and Oregon. Unfortunately, giant trees are routinely chipped. I agree with you that it's utterly stupid, and I wish that you were right that this beautiful wood was only going to appropriate purposes, like making beautiful homes or cabinetry.
There's a bit of a mixed metaphor when I talk about 100-year-old maples. The point is that there's a lot of second-growth forest around the U.S. in areas that were clearcut during the original settling of the country, in order to produce fields for farming, and have since lain fallow for fifty to a hundred years, and are now woodland again.
These lots have a mixture of maple and pine and oak, and various other varieties as well. They make for beautiful forests, and great habitat. And they're very profitable to cut down. Not all the wood goes for paper--you try to get the highest price you can for the wood you cut--but chipping wood for pulp is one place where the wood does go. And what is planted, if anything, after this mayhem, is not a diverse forest, but an ugly stand of pines in rows, intended to be cut down again in 40 years.
There's nothing wrong in principle with planting pines for harvest--we need wood for building, and the need for paper is never going to zero out, although I hope that we can get to the point where we're making good use of it, and not just printing on it and then throwing it away. But when someone gives you the cut-one, plant-three line, it pays to be skeptical. If you do the math, it's pretty obviously a deliberate attempt to mislead.
And then theere's the "old growth forest" issue. Sure, manageed plantations of new growth wood are sustainable & tick lots of "eco" boxes but when you start buldozing "old growth" forests - habitatbs for many, many more species than "managed plantations", you're in a differet game.