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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
.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.