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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."
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.
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.
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.
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