Paper is a material
many people in industrialised countries take entirely for granted.
Millions of trees are felled, pulped,
made into paper, printed on, then binned without even being read.
Why is it that we treat cotton, linen
and other fabrics made from plant fibres with great respect –
laundering them carefully, even mending them when they tear –
yet we toss barely used sheets of paper into the rubbish bin that
are pulped from trees, the oldest living organisms on the planet?
Part of the reason
is because so much of the paper we encounter is given to us for
free, often without us asking for it. We consume paper mostly
as a side-effect of buying other commodities that we really want:
magazines, newspapers and books are sources of information, packaging
keeps the goods we desire clean or unsquashed, and so on. Comparatively
little of our paper consumption is the result of buying paper
products directly; notebooks and toilet rolls are the exception
rather than the rule. Junk mail, catalogues and free newspapers
encourage us to perceive paper as a material with little or no
value; you wouldn’t give out 4 million free newspapers a day in
London alone if this stuff was actually worth anything, would
you?
Paper’s low value
is coupled with a sense that it is a natural, safe and fairly
benign product. It is not exactly uranium, but the sheer scale
of this product makes it a serious environmental and social issue.
Paper consumption has quadrupled in the past four decades and
its production uses almost half of the planet’s industrially logged
timber, more water than any other industrial product and as much
energy per tonne as steel. Each tonne of paper requires 98 tonnes
of other resources to manufacture and it is the single biggest
contributor to the waste stream of most consumer countries. To
reduce our impacts on the planet, using less paper is a good place
to start.
The global pulp and
paper industry is fuelled by money from those who buy its products,
and most of us are in the high consumption countries of the global
North, so our purchasing power is an important lever for bringing
about systemic change in the industry. Curtailing demand for its
products should reduce some of the money-supply that is fuelling
its expansion in the global South. At least bringing about a reduction
in demand for paper in Europe would help to offset the growth
in demand that is likely in other parts of the world. If the fifth
of the world’s population that currently use most of the world’s
paper were to cut their paper use by half, that would create a
lot of room for people whose current paper use is very low to
increase their consumption without a need for any global expansion
of paper production capacity.
Identifying ways
to cut paper use is easy. The new website
www.shrinkpaper.org invites individuals to make a pledge to
adopt their choice of several suggestions from using a cotton
handkerchief to shifting to an electronic filing system. Organisations
and businesses can easily save paper too. Many
already have already taken some steps in the right direction –
after all, they can save money by cutting their paper costs and
associated expenses (printing, postage, storage etc). Many companies
find they can swiftly reduce paper use by 30% or more by simple
changes to office practices.
So if it is so easy,
why has reducing paper consumption not been at the heart of every
forest campaign agenda for years? There is a resistance to campaigning
about reducing consumption, which is expressed sometimes in terms
of ‘not wanting to give the impression that paper is worse than
other materials like plastics’ or ‘not wanting to make people
feel guilty about their lifestyles’ or ‘worrying about seeming
anti-growth’. As a result, many paper campaigns appear to imply
that using paper made from more sustainably sourced fibres is
what really matters, regardless of what quantity is used. In reality,
both fibre sources and quantity matter.
A key question to
ask is why our paper consumption keeps on increasing. One suggestion
is that it is rooted in cultural insecurity: our lack of trust
in each other leads society to red tape, bureaucracy and ever
expanding paper trails; our fear of contamination drives excessive
packaging; our worries about disease cause fetishistic levels
of tissue use for hygiene; our weakening cultural identities make
us susceptible to brand advertising. Perhaps, therefore, promotion
of paper saving could have beneficial cultural effects?
The debate about
global climate change means that for the first time in my life,
possibly since the start of the industrial revolution, it is possible
to talk in polite company about using less of something – energy
– without being considered anti-progress. This creates a great
opportunity to promote an ethos that
is positive about reduction, makes thrift a virtue and treats
‘less’ as a positive concept. I hope promoting paper saving will
contribute in a small way to promoting a cultural change that
values efficiency more than growth and gets people into mental
habits to perceive using less of things as a good thing to do.
By Mandy Haggith,
hag@worldforests.org Her book Paper Trails: from
trees to trash, the true cost of paper, will be published
by Virgin Books on 3 July 2008.
