Please don’t squeeze the forests

The holiday season is upon us. Candles glitter in the windows, families and friends congregate around the fireplace, and I’m thinking about paper.

Approximately 93 percent of our paper comes from trees. Paper production uses about a fifth of the total wood harvest worldwide, and as much as half of all the 85 million tons of paper products Americans consume each year goes toward packaging, wrapping and decorating presents. Here’s how it works: we convert trees into glittery gift-wrap and shopping bags, rip it off our presents, crumple it up and throw it out to the tune of four million tons of trash. So trees end up in the landfills.

That sounds really crazy to me.

There are alternatives. Wrap gifts in reusable fabric like napkins, dishtowels or pillowcases. Or follow my aunt’s example. She painstakingly unwrapped her gifts and saved the paper—she was a tree-hugger before it became chic. If you save it, you can buy less of it and fewer resources will be used.

To purchase eco-friendly paper made from kenaf, flax, hemp, jute, sugar cane, Daphne bush bark and bark from mulberry trees—all renewable, tree-free sources—visit greenyour.com/lifestyle .

Yet another option is recycled paper, which uses about 60 percent of the energy needed to make paper from virgin wood pulp. One ton of recycled paper saves 17 mature trees, 7,000 gallons of water, three cubic yards of landfill space, two barrels of oil, and 4,100-kilowatt hours of electricity, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

There are 2.65 billion Christmas cards sold each year in the U.S. Before they’re hauled off to the landfill, they could fill a football field 10 stories high. If we each sent one card less this year, we’d save 50,000 cubic yards of paper. Better yet, send electronic cards.

The Food and Agriculture Administration reported in 2007 that Americans used more than 90 million tons of paper and paperboard—one-third of the world’s paper. That equals on average 950 pounds of paper products per person. Let’s consider another significant way to reduce our consumption.

It’s an unglamorous subject, but someone has to talk about toilet paper (TP). America is the largest worldwide market for TP: each of us uses about 23.6 rolls per year.

Our demand for ultra-soft paper (for the comfort of our supposedly delicate bums) requires clear-cutting irreplaceable virgin forests that absorb heat-trapping CO2 and provide habitat for innumerable plants and animals, some of them endangered. Only fiber from standing trees can make the TP fluffy, so millions of trees are harvested from old-growth forests in North and Latin America, and from the boreal forest in Canada.

We also want our TP ultra-white, so manufacturers treat the paper with polluting chlorine-based bleach, thereby producing hundreds of chlorinated organic compounds, the most potent chemical toxins known.

Thank goodness we don’t have to return to the days my mother often told me about. Her family hung old telephone books from a hook next to the toilet. We can buy TP made from recycled paper. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), if every U.S. household replaced one 500-sheet roll of virgin-fiber TP with 100 percent recycled TP, we’d save almost half a million trees each year. We’d not only save virgin-growth forests, but we’d send a message to manufacturers that there is a demand for the product.

Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist and waste expert for the NRDC, said in a New York Times story: “No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper.” I hope you can see his point.

Both Greenpeace.org and NRDC.org provide printable PDF guides that rate TP and other tissue paper products.