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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
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.
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.
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 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!
...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.
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!
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.
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.
"This page intentionally left black." - sponsored by HP Toner and Ink Division.
Anybody want a peanut?