Originally posted by SkipSlotThere you have it, from the inside. Thanks for the post. Although not all of my points held up, several important ones have been confirmed:
I've been employeed by the paper industry for 20 years. Although I work in the finished products (corrugated boxes) sector of it, I do know some about the other end. The argument here is virgin pulp versus recycled fiber. My corporation has reduced the virgin production at the mills considerably over the years, from about 20% recycled 20 years ago to about ...[text shortened]... gether is an organic mixture which earth worms (which are natural cultivators) are attracted to.
"My corporation has reduced the virgin production at the mills considerably over the years, from about 20% recycled 20 years ago to about 75 to 80% today. As a result it sold off several hundred thousand acres of forest land to cut back on raw material it needed for the mills, land which will most likely be used for development of other industry" - ie. the land has most probably been deforested and used for something else that doesn't invlve trees at all. If you reduce the need for trees for paper you reduce the need for the forests, the land gets sold to other industries, and the forests disappear.
"recycled is much more difficult to run on equipment and still get a quality product" "Recycled fibers are shorter in length and are more densely packed into the sheet to create a liner of equilalent strength" - recycled paper is of lower quality, so you need to use more of it to be equivelent to 'new' paper.
"Weither or not it takes more energy to produce the product is beside the point, the profit we make off the production is much more" "the bottom line is money" - which clearly states that the manufacturers don't particularly care whether or not recycling paper is enviromentally friendly, but they'll use that angle to get your cooperation.
This brings me onto my dislike of enviromentalist movements, as they usually don't actually know what they're talking about. Like the animal activists who released all the mink from a farm in the middle of England a few years ago, they acted on a single simple idea (that wearing fur is wrong) with no further thought or investigation. The mink ran amok, killing chickens & pets etc (they're vicous little beasts), until they died because they couldn't survive in that enviroment. And the fact that the mink furs were to be sold to the Russian market, where wearing furs is more essential for life than we find wearing leather shoes wasn't taken into account.
How about the protestors that succeeded in getting the public to boycott Shell petrol stations because Shell were going to sinkan old oil platform into a deep see trench. They succeeded in pressuring Shell into towing the rig to land (Denmark?) where it was dismantled at graet cost. And when a proper scientific investigation was carried out it was found that dragging it onto land had caused large enviromental damage by the radiaoctive mudds leaking out, but if they'd dropped it into the trench in the first place it would have almost been an assett as an animal habitat with no significant detriment to the enviroment.
The point I'm trying to get to is that people are annoyingly blind when it comes to "enviromentally friendly" issues. Because it makes basic sense they don't question it further, even though it might really be bad for the enviroment.
(and there are others too. Decafinated coffee is better for you, isn't it? Ever stopped to ask yourself what they replaced the caffine with, and what is added to the coffee to pull the caffine out? It is thought to be worse for your heart than the caffine was in the first place)
Belgianfreak, you might consider not taking everything in that last post as gospel.
For starters, I don't think it is true that paper in a landfill biodegrades in "a short amount of time." Once paper gets buried under other stuff, it's out of the elements, and protected from bacteria, and hence doesn't biodegrade quickly at all. You can get decades-old newspapers from a landfill that are still readable.
Here's a link:
http://www.discover.com/feb_02/breakdialogue.html (see the last item).
By the way, a little research suggsts that paper products take up 40% or so of all landfill space. Not inconsiderable.
cont....
Well, I looked at SkipSlot's post again, and I can find very little evidence in it to support a claim that paper recycling is bad for the environment. He did say that his company had sold some forest land, but he doesn't know what it's currently being used for. It may well still be logged for other wood products, for example. Regardless, it's one anecdote, and by itself it proves nothing. In fact, I believe the US is actually becoming more forested as time goes by, so it doesn't seem that the boom in recycling is causing us to lose lots of forest.
You then say that you need more recycled paper than new paper to do the same work. Fine, but how exactly does that fact make recycled paper worse for the environment? Regardless of how much you need, that would be paper sitting in a landfill if it weren't recycled.
Finally, we still have no idea about the relative levels of pollution produced by recycling vs. new paper production facilities, and we haven't thought at all about other associated enviromental impacts: construction of roads, transport of logs, etc.
In short, there's just no way we have heard enough evidence to come to any sort of viable conclusion about the costs and benefits of paper recycling. Nonetheless, you have concluded that recyling is bad for the environment. Based on what?
Unless you can show evidence of having done some actual research on this, it seems like you are just fishing for ways to outsmart the environmentalists.
I'm no ecologist, but here's some examples from my own life.
As a child I grew up in a small town that heavily relied upon the logging industry as its primary source of revenue. We conducted our logging in an "ethical" manner, never clear cutting an area and often reseeding areas that were heavily logged. Due to the presence of a somewhat endangered species (spotted owls), the mass majority of the local logging industry was shut down. Over three quarters of the local populace lost their jobs.
For you US folks out there, this was in the same area that the Arizona Rodeo fire occured last summer. Many of the local people are angered. They were angry when they lost their way of life, and are even more so now. It has been greatly argued in the area how many homes may have been saved if the logging industry hadn't been shut down.
This is not an isolated incident. Where I currently live (Durango, CO) there was a similar situation last summer. Many of you may have heard about the Hayman fire near Denver last summer. At the same time as the Hayman fire, my city had its own fire (the Missionary Ridge fire). During the fire (and ongoing to this day) the people raised the same concerns that reasonable logging could have done much to stop the fire. Post fire ecologist specialists have greatly speculated that the fire could quite possibly have been stopped in its early stages if even sparse logging had been present in the area. The fire caused much many more problems than just the scorching of the land. As a result of it, the city has had mudslides in a wide vicinity around the burned areas. The first day it rained after the fire I saw mud and ash almost an inch thick run through city streets by my home (almost three miles away from the burn area). Much of the citys water reserves have either become polluted or great countermeasures had to be taken at a tremendous taxpayer expense (I had to buy my drinking water from the store by the gallon for two months). It goes on and on.
It should be noted that the fires of last summer were incredibly unusual and mostly due to the drought. Nonetheless, last summer many of our nations forests suffered the greatests wildland fires on record. For truth, I know that the Rodeo is the largest AZ has ever had. The Hayman is the largest CO ever had, second place goes to my towns Missionary Ridge. While casualties were not many in these, I can attest to the suffering caused. Most of all the fear involved.
From my own experience, I can tell you this:
1) Responsible logging is not only a good thing, but more or less required in certain areas yto establish a healthy relationship between human habitation and the wilderness.
2) There are areas that do not need to be logged (like the rainforest) and should be preserved for their uniqueness.
3) The biodegradeability of paper is pretty good.
4) As mentioned before, paper is a renewable resource.
5) Recycling MAY be helpful in some circumstances, but I favor reuseing things as it takes nothing but human effort usually to do so.
In short, I am in favor of harvesting trees and replanting them as we go. I know it is true that paper takes up a large portion of our landfills. I hope that the "digital" age of information may help alleviate this substantially. I also agree with the soft trees ideal. The trees that paper is usually made from do grow especially fast. I do also believe in the harvesting of hard woods, but of rational types (like the pinon pine) whose life span allows for a healthy harvesting age that does not detract from the forest on either a visual or ecological basis.
It is my belief that the key to a healthy relationship with our forests lies in middle. We need to use the trees, just in a rational manner. The typical immage used by the so-called tree huggers ( I make the distinction because I love trees and do actually hug them from time to time myself ) is that of a clear cut area. This is not the usual case, and hasn't been so for a long time in most of the US. Legislation is in place in most parts that prevent such detrimental harvesting tactics. There is a lot of distortion in the issue from what is real on both sides.
I could go into a long tirade about other aspects, but I see that I have ranted long enough for now. Anyway, I hope this was insightful. OK, lecture over. Class dismissed. 😴
Some environmentalists seem to think 'Wouldn't it be so much better if humans didn't exist?' and go from there, saying anything we do is 'unnatural'. 😠If someone tells me GM crops are 'Frankenfood', I'll suggest that they stop eating ANYTHING grown on a farm. Farming was invented only about 10000 years ago, and most of the plants and animals we eat would not exist in anything like their current form if it wasn't for agriculture (eg bananas are completely infertile, but their wild cousins are almost completely inedible because they're so full of seeds.)
there's just no way we have heard enough evidence to come to any sort of viable conclusion about the costs and benefits of paper recycling.absolutely, there has been no where near enough evidence presented to say whether or not recycling paper is bad for the enviroment, and I am being inflamitory by suggesting that it is.
However, what interests & annoys me at the same time is that if you ask ANYBODY on the street if recycling paper is a good thing, they will answer "yes" with conviction. Ask them why, and they will only be able to give you half answers that are more than likely wrong.
My point is that people latch onto "green" ideas and the hold them as gospel truth without questioning them, when they are often not as green as they are led to believe. I don'r know if recycling paper is good or bad for the enviroment, but the fact that noone here has been able to argue decisivly that it is illustrates my point.
My expertise is limited to the corrugated industry and it does biodegrade "when water is added" because of the chemical process (corn starch) to get the paper to stick together. One of the tests we perform to see if the product is bonding well enough is take the product and soak it in water, immediately the fibers start to break down and we can see exactly where the glue is applied. You take any paper, however, that doesn't have a wax film on it (like magazines) and you will get the same results. If the newspapers at the landfills don't break down it's because moisture can't reach the paper to begin the natural process. I've taken a plastic sack and filled it up with newspapers before and sit it in my compost pile, within 8 months of heat and moisture it turned into a rich soil. The reason for this is that during one point in the milling cycle, the product is 99.5% water and very little of the actual fiber and pulp. Adding water to paper (without wax) reverses the process that the mills started. If paper is not breaking down at landfills it is the negligence of the landfills operators not the product or process itself that is the problem.
Some environmentalists seem to think 'Wouldn't it be so much better if humans didn't exist?' and go from there, saying anything we do is 'unnatural'. If someone tells me GM crops are 'Frankenfood', I'll suggest that they stop eating ANYTHING grown on a farm. Farming was invented only about 10000 years ago, and most of the plants and animals we eat would not exist in anything like their current form if it wasn't for agriculture (eg bananas are completely infertile, but their wild cousins are almost completely inedible because they're so full of seeds.)