Whenever you have chance to fly over our continent, please look at the endless stretches of green and think, 'There are enough trees to last us forever.' Of course, there aren't. Look at newspaper that we read everyday, a single edition of newspaper uses 75,000 trees. All that paper comes from our forest. The endless stretches of green may not be so endless after all. But we've been led to believe that every tree that's cut is replaced.

If the earth heats up much more, because of the green-house effect, some of our replanted area will not survive as forest. Many of the immature replanted areas are already showing signs of ill health. The young seedings may never become mature trees.

We can't blame all of this deforestation on our insatiable need of paper. Agriculture, urbanization, recreation and industry all take large tracts of our forests-but we are, as individuals, prolific and wasteful paper users, both at home and in the office.

    Some 40% to 50% of what we throw away is paper.

Think of any office-all those filing cabinets full of paper, all those boxes of paper by the copying machine, all those reports, all those paysheets, checks, applications, submissions, letters, envelopes, computer paper, phone message slips, file folders, and all those duplicates, triplicates of all information useful and useless. Then picture that one office multiplied by all the offices on the same floor of the building, then multiplied by the number of floors in the building, then multiplied by the number of buildings in the city or town, then multiplied by the number of cities in the country, on the continent, in the world.

    It takes 17 trees to make one ton of paper. Depending on what newpapers you read, you could be using up one tree every 10 weeks--week after week after week...

How many trees ordinary individuals could save in a year with home and work conservation practices?
Also bear in mind that paper production is extremely hard on our water system. We bleach wood pulp to make white paper products, including everything from office stationery, computer paper and books, to diapers, sanitary supplies, milk cartoons and coffee filters. In the process, numerous toxic waste products, such as deadly dioxins and furans, are created and dumped into our water systems. Neither is recycling always the answer. De-inking, bleaching and processing used paper causes similar problems.
Nearly half of all untreated effluents discharged into our water comes from pulp and paper industry.
You can't prevent all this by yourself. But simple consevation practices can--and will--help. Furthermore, just like most conservation methods, you'll likely save money while you're at it.