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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."
If ANYONE in power had balls and brains, we'd be using hemp paper instead of wood-based pulp paper. That is all.
The continued government assisted prop-up of industries unwilling to evolve with technology, or environmental social concerns, is why we have half the problems we do. Why must this behavior persist?
Actually, he might be on to something. I just printed this article out and it's a helluva lot funnier in print.
Cheers, Chris
It's not individuals that paper companies need to worry about in my opinion. When you have major gaming companies like Ubisoft claiming that they will no longer manufacture paper game manuals then you have a the beginnings of a major problem (at least if you are in the paper industry or whatever). If large companies stop printing manuals for games, or software, or stop printing instruction manuals for home appliances, and so on, you'll probably see an even bigger impact on paper companies than the losses of individuals skimping on paper use.
I don't print anything anymore. I don't own a printer. And I doubt that I will need one in the future. However I buy tons of video games, movies, appliances, and so on. If those things stop coming with paper manuals and books then it will make a difference.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/108/1084491p1.html [Ubisoft Removing Paper Game Manuals]
Actually, he might be on to something. I just printed this article out and it's a helluva lot funnier in print.
And on paper you can't be modded down.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Most likely using less of almost anything is an environmental positive. Consider the footprint of harvest, transport, disposal. Plus it costs the user more to print than to read on screen, so it's bad business to print when you don't need to. Sure, it's not like they are making paper out of old growth forest. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing to waste paper.
hmmm I'll revisit your argument when the number of trees chopped down due to paper manufacturing drops below the number of new trees planted 5 years ago (ie. that are now reaching maturity - its no use going on new trees planted if those trees never grow to fully replace the trees that were chopped down).
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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....
It's not an environmental "negative". They plant three times as many trees as they harvest. Paper is a truly renewable resource, especially since it is recyclable, in many different ways.
Printing pages pointlessly is a negative, because you waste energy in the paper production, for no good reason. And you waste your own money. But using paper "responsibly" -- for things you want to keep hard copies of -- is entirely appropriate, and not wasteful.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
People frequently forget about all those pesky middle parts.
Trees are harvested. They're transported to the location making the paper. It's packaged and distributed to various tiers of warehouses. It's then distributed to retail outlets, and then to the point of use. From there, it's distributed to waste or recycling centers, or specialized centers for proper destruction. I'd be willing to bet the carbon footprint for the transportation is higher than the trees themselves that are used in the process.
Someone had a good point. The carbon is sequestered, assuming the paper is kept. Most places have more paper going in the trash than they do staying in long term storage.
When I was a kid, my parents took about 10 acres of empty land and planted trees on them. It consumed a good bit of time and fuel. Try planting rows upon rows of trees, and you'll find it's not a job to be done by hand. My dad passed away and my mom eventually moved. Google Maps satellite view showed the land to still be full of trees, but the street view (more recent) showed it to have been clear cut for other purposes. I'd guess by the person who bought the house (at least two owners later who renovated it) to sell the entire property as a horse farm. Dense trees don't make for good grazing land for livestock.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
They might be whackos, but you're a beefknob.
Sure, trees grow in dirt. That's TREES. Not paper. There are few steps involved before you get your fucking paper. First you have to cut the damn trees down. That takes energy from chainsaws or specialized tree-cutting machinery. Then you have to remove the branches. Then you have to gather the things up (did you know trees are fucking heavy?). Then you have to put them on a truck. Then you have to haul the motherfuckers to some huge-ass factory somewhere (did I mention trees are fucking heavy?). Then you've got to turn them into pulp 'n shit. THEN you've got to package the fucking paper. Then you've got to haul THAT shit to some warehouse, where it sits around wasting space in an air conditioned facility (don't want that paper getting moldy!). Then you've got to ship the fucking paper AGAIN to some store somewhere. And then some chump has to get in their SUV, drive 20 miles to their favorite store to pick up one item (that'd be the paper), and then drive the fuck home.
For some paper.
And THEN they print out a picture of the goatsex guy for him to autograph. They get their trophy signature, but later their mom makes them throw it out. So it ends up in the trash, along with millions of tons of other worthless paper, that gets hauled in yet another fucking truck, where it ends up in a landfill (no recycling here, 'cause you're all about carbon sequestration or some such shit!).
After all that energy's been spent, how much do you think your precious carbon sequestration really counts?
Like I said. BEEF. KNOB.
and how that's supposedly good because the carbon is sequestered, etc. Not many posts about the chemical nasties involved in converting trees to pulp to paper, or where those nasties end up, or how much energy is required to harvest the wood, convert it, and deliver it, or how much waste is in the manufacturing of printers, ink cartridges, and ink.
If demand for paper continues to fall, know what that land will be used for? Growing trees. Instead of using that timber for paper, it'll be used for lumber or for biomass electricity generation (which has a net zero carbon emission).
So yeah, trust your instincts on this one... like nearly every processed item, wasting less paper is better for the environment.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
> And those processing chemicals are recycled as much as possible too.
There are 3 R's. And they have a specific order, as in, what is best for the environment.
1 Reduce
2 Reuse
3 Recycle
Recycle is literally 1 step up from pouring it down the drain.
Arguing that we don't need to bother reducing because some of what is used get's recycled is, well, asinine.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Have we lost the ability to grow trees?
Have you tried to buy a nice piece of wood lately? The answer to your question is "yes" but it has nothing to do with environmentalists, it's because the timber industry replaces the good forests they cut down with crappy fast-growing trees that produce knotty lumber because it's cheaper and faster that way.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
...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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"that produce knotty lumber" I went down to the hardware store last week and there was a huge array of hard and softwoods, they even had structural pine with 100% knot free money back guarantee. all of it was sourced from managed timber plantations - thats HOW they get the wood knot free ffs.... by stripping the branches off early.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
After you write "That is all." you are supposed to stop writing. That is all.
Do you see how it sort of loses the effect when you keep right on going like this? Also we can pretty much tell when you're done by the period and then the lack of any more words.
> Certainly, wasting paper is a waste. But if you're not wasting it, it isn't a waste to use it.
But that's exactly what the executive is trying to get people to do. He's saying that young people AREN'T printing enough stuff out.
So, either young people aren't effectively communicating, and he's suggesting that they can do this by printing stuff out [he's trying to help them, and only incidentally helping himself], or they are effectively communicating, only without using paper, and he's suggesting that they switch from non-paper media [such as email, wiki's, etc] to paper media [ie, his suggestion is entirely self-serving].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
From the article, a statement from Domtar CEO...
"No one is more interested in the well-managed forest than the paper industry."
I live in the Pacfic Northwest and I am surrounded by "managed" clearcuts.
The forestry industry has this odd idea that "managed" means planting one species, equally spaced for easy harvesting, and often not even a species native to the region. "Grow it fast, grow it thick" is the rule, not the exception.
The "managed" forests out here feel "dead". There is very little diversity in flora on the floor of the forest and I can only assume that is why it feels "dead". The animal life that depended on that diversity is absent. I remember walking through a "managed" re-forested area one time and it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn't being pestered by mosquitos or gnats. Odd. It wasn't until later that I realized that the stuff they feed on was missing from the forest--no food, no bugs. The diversity had been 'managed" right out of the forest.
"Managed" is a relative term, and open to damn near any interpretation you wish.
I seriously doubt that a paper manufacturer and an environmentalist would agree on those interpretations, especially when a dipshit like John Williams is involved.
Step 1 is still "reduce", as in use less, as in do precisely the opposite of what these paper vendors are suggesting.
Are people honestly arguing that we should use more paper because the people who stand to financially benefit from using more paper said so? Have we gotten to be that stupid? The reduction in paper usage has come from a lot of places, and the "environmentalist" movement might be the loudest, but absolutely is not the most important. There are immediate and obvious economic benefits to printing less, benefits which actually grow geometrically with the size of the organization in question... 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.
The USPS has seen declines in business for most of the same reasons... it's just cheaper to send a file across the internet than it is to send a physical piece of paper with the same information.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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. In thirty-three years, you will have cut down 3,300 acre-years of growth. You will have replaced it with 1680 acre-years of growth. Not even counting the fact that you've destroyed 33 acres of quality second-growth forest and replaced it with 99 acres of farmed forest.
So when you hear "we plant three for every one we cut," just bear in mind that the person saying this to you is definitely trying to deceive you. There is no other possible motivation for that statement, because what they cut is in no way comparable to what they put in its place. They are mining the forest, and leaving you with the tailings.
If they were planting real second-growth forest, and if they were going to be around for a hundred years, then we could talk about environmental improvements, but that's not at all what this guy is talking about. Or if they were planting barren fields and harvesting the trees years later when they'd grown enough, you could say that they'd planted a crop and harvested it. But that's not what they said, and it's not even close to what they're doing.
last i checked paper was made from the waste from milling timber from sustainably managed forests as well as recycled sources.
Yes, right. That's the only input to paper manufacture. Timber.
No large volumes of energy produced from primarily non-renewable resources.
Or large volumes of harsh chemicals.
Or large volumes of water.
And the only output is nice, clean paper.
No gaseous carbon, nitrous, or sulphur dioxide.
No water pollution.
And, of course, there is absolutely no paper, anywhere, being manufactured from old-growth trees or anything like that. It's totally sustainable and awesome! Really!
Having just skimmed the paper, it doesn't look like they account for CO2 removed from the atmosphere by the growing trees. Here's a quick calculation of that:
Assumption 1: all plant matter which does not make its way into paper is burned, or otherwise releases its carbon as CO2, hence is neutral for this analysis. (It could net contribute to greenhouse if it releases as methane instead.)
Assumption 2: paper is 100% cellulose.
Cellulose is a polymer of (C5 H10 O5), which means that it is 4/9 carbon by weight. One unit of carbon burns to produce 11/3 = 3.667 units of CO2. So one unit of paper would burn to produce 44/27 = 1.630 units of CO2, and conversely, 1.63 tonnes of CO2 were removed from the atmosphere to make that paper.
So we're still behind on CO2. And, of course, there are all sorts of other environmental costs.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You can still dig up readable newspapers from the 1800's.
Yeah, but then it's stinky. You should probably just read today's news, it's more current anyway.
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.
"This page intentionally left black." - sponsored by HP Toner and Ink Division.
Anybody want a peanut?
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.
In the last decades, my country has been planted with millions of eucalyptus and wild pines, that are completely alien, to produce paper.
The results: We have almost no native forest, every summer there are big wild fires all around the country, the eucalyptus suck all the water from kilometres around, ruining the few farmers and herders that still subsist.
The planting areas that were abandoned because of fires of owner carelessness are now bare, completely exposed to soil erosion. These areas are will eventually become desert land in the next years if nothing is done.
Of course, the government could step in and take two measures:
But in these days of free-market fundamentalism, the government can't do shit because it would go against the "legitimate rights" of the land owners or something. When the whole country looks like Saudi Arabia without the oil, the land owners can stuff their legitimate rights up their asses and try to survive eating sand.
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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