Earth Day and Newspapers: Seeing the forest for the trees
Submitted by David Johnson on Thu, 04/19/2007 - 15:39
ShareThis In 2003, the paper industry in the U.S. reached its goal to recover 50 percent of all paper.
By achieving this goal, 20 million more tons of paper was recovered. The industry has set a new goal of recovering 55 percent of used paper by 2012.
Today, more than a third of all the paper that is recovered in the world is recovered in the U.S.
Old corrugated containers (boxes) account for nearly 50 percent of the total paper that is recycled.
So, I work for a newspaper company that is also a network television company and an internet company... or is it a cable company that also owns newspapers... or is a floor wax and a dessert topping? Well, that's neither here nor there. In my spare time, I'm also big into environmental issues, and started a growing online community called mygreenspace.net. Anyhoo, enough about me...
My old blogger buddy, Jeff Jarvis, posted about how many trees the newspaper industry is consuming the other day over at buzzmachine.com. In my many media rants and ramblings, I've mentioned before that I consider London, England to be the bellwether of the newspaper industry, it is easily the most competitive and innovative print market in the world. In his post, Jeff quotes some stats on the consumption of trees by London papers where free tabloids are the big battlefront:
Look at the ballpark figures behind the 1.5 million daily papers put out by the current four. It takes 12 established trees to make one tonne of newsprint, which is enough to print 14,000 editions of an average-size tabloid. That means a daily usage of newsprint of a little over 107 tonnes. Which, in turn, means the felling of 1,284 trees.
What starts in London shows up elsewhere. Free tabloids are big in the newspaper industry. While reporters are busy reporting on the demise of newspapers, the threat of the Internet, and Wall Street sneering at the industry's returns, there are actually more newspapers in circulation worldwide today than there ever have been before according to the World Association of Newspapers.
Jeff goes on to note that the industry worldwide consumed 37.8 million tons of newsprint in 2001, which at 12 trees per ton, accounts for 453 million trees. While I read a lighthearted tone into Jeff's comments (he is generally a pretty sarcastic guy), that level of industry-driven deforestation is by no means insignificant (see this link and also this link for more). Free daily newspaper circulation more than doubled from 2001 to 2005, from 12 million copies in 2001 to 28 million in 2005, an increase of 137 percent. It stands to reason that the greenies are starting to look at free newspapers very critically.
So are we really cutting down that many trees to print newspapers? Let's take a look at newspaper recycling. In 2001, that same year of Jeff's numbers, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) (another disclaimer, I'm a long-time member of their New Media Federation and a former editor of their Online Publishing Update) offered that "Over 38 percent of old newspapers recycled in 2001 were turned into new newsprint. Another 20 percent were exported to countries such as Canada, where old newspapers are recycled into new newsprint and other paper products." The same statement went on: "The newspaper recycling rate has climbed from 35 percent in 1988 to 78 percent in 2001. Last year, 9 million of the 11 million tons of newspaper in the U.S. was recovered and recycled."Click here to read the whole statement on the NAA site. Look at that link, we recycle more newsprint than just about anything else. Hooray for us!
Those numbers seem pretty good. Even better, they seem to be getting better. Ace Scripps data reporter (and self-proclaimed nerd, seriously, he really says it) Tom Hargrove found this great page at the Energy Information Administration that says so. 35 percent of recovered paper is turned into newsprint. Here's more:
While papers were stacking up with no place to be recycled back in the early 90s, there is now real demand and more and more paper mills are working with recycled paper, like SP Newsprint, which states they recycle 1,000,000 tons of old newsprint annually.. And this is a double win for the environment. A paper mill uses 40 percent less energy to make paper from recycled paper than it does to make paper from fresh lumber. And also, here's another good news for newspapers quote from the EIA page:
Paper recycling does mean fewer trees are used to make paper, but all-new paper is almost always made from trees specifically grown for papermaking. A tree harvested for papermaking is soon replaced by another, so the cycle continues. “We are not talking about the rain forest or old growth in the Pacific Northwest,”? says Champion Paper’s Martin Blick. “Most of the trees cut for paper come from fifth or sixth generation pulp-wood forests.”?
Still it could be better. The federal government is required by law to use recycled paper. There are a number of states, such as Illinois and Maryland with laws about recycling newsprint, too.
There is shrinking demand for newsprint in the United States, but the trend may not stay that way. As we are aggressively looking at ways to control the changing climate that include proposed caps in greenhouse gas emissions, it may be high time that the industry ups the ante and moves to printing only on recycled paper. It ain't easy being green, but it may be well worth it many ways.
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