Posted: Fri Feb 17, 06 11:29 am Post subject: Recycled Paper
Got a bit of a shock this morning. I'm organising a conference in the university, and had to go through a consultation with a printer-man for the brochures, folders, posters etc. Apparently recycled paper is three to four times the cost of unrecycled! And, according to him, is not enviromentally friendly at all. He described to me the way that colour dyes permeate paper, and then how the scraps are collected to be recycled, but then bleached to within an inch of their lives. Hmmm. So our conference will have unrecycled paraphenalia.
Was he right?
For every tonne of paper used for recycling the savings are:
at least 30000litres of water
3000 - 4000 KWh electricity (enough for an average 3 bedroom house for one year)
95% of air pollution.
Producing recycled paper involves between 28 - 70% less energy consumption than virgin paper and uses less water. This is because most of the energy used in papermaking is the pulping needed to turn wood into paper.
remember too unrecycled paper either goes to incineration or landfill. Paper is a biodegradable material. This means that when it goes to landfill, as it rots, it produces methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas (20 times more potent than carbon dioxide).
i think your printer may have been trying to sell his available range and justify his overpriced recycled paper prices!