Paper Energy and Recycled Material

I was just surfing on the net looking for random facts about the 3-R’s, (recycle, reuse, reduce), when I came across some information that I found to be amazing, at least to me.

• 1 ton of un-coated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees
• 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees

A pallet of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton. Therefore:

• 1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses 0.6 trees
• 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
• 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)
• 1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)
• 1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for news magazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)

There is controversy on just how much energy is saved through recycling. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) states on its website that “a paper mill uses 40 percent less energy to make paper from recycled paper than it does to make paper from fresh lumber. Critics often argue that in the overall processes, it can take more energy to produce recycled products than it does to dispose of them in traditional landfill methods. This argument is followed from the curbside collection of recyclables, which critics note is often done by a second waste truck. Recycling proponents point out that a second timber or logging truck is eliminated when paper is collected for recycling.
It is difficult to determine the exact amount of energy consumed or produced in waste disposal processes. How much energy is used in recycling depends largely on the type of material being recycled and the process used to do so. Aluminum is generally agreed to use far less energy when recycled rather than being produced from scratch. The EPA states that “recycling aluminum cans, for example, saves 95 percent of the energy required to make the same amount of aluminum from its virgin source, bauxite.”
Economist Steven Landsburg has suggested that the sole benefit of reducing landfill space is trumped by the energy needed and resulting pollution from the recycling process. Others, however, have calculated through life cycle assessment that producing recycled paper uses less energy and water than harvesting, pulping, processing, and transporting virgin trees. By using less recycled paper, additional energy is needed to create and maintain farmed forests until these forests are as self-sustainable as virgin forests.
Public policy analyst James V. DeLong points out that recycling is a manufacturing process and many of the methods use more energy than they save. In addition to energy usage, he notes that recycling requires capital and labor while producing some waste. These processes need to be more efficient than production from original raw material and/or traditional garbage disposal in order for recycling to be the superior method

submitted by stylianos on June 08, 2009.

The process of recycling goods requires a lot of water and energy, often so much that the ends don’t justify the means. Paper takes more energy to recycle than plastic does (approximately 91% more energy according to the EPA), thus making it more expensive to recycle paper bags. However, plastic bags are much less likely to be recycled in the first place as less that 5% of plastic bags get recycled.

Although plastic takes less energy to recycle, it is still not a great solution. Plastic bags must be recycled by themselves because they have a tendency to jam machines. Additionally, there is no economic incentive to recycle plastic bags. It costs about $4,000 to recycle a ton of plastic bags. In turn, that one ton of recycled plastic bags can be sold for $32 on the commodities  market.

If you throw away an aluminum can, it wastes as much energy as if you filled that can half full of gasoline and poured it on the ground. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for almost four hours or run your television for three hours. (Source: Earth9111 recycled glass bottle would save enough energy to power a computer for 25 minutes. (Source: Recycling Guide)

Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. (Source: Do Something)The energy used to produce one day’s junk mail in the United States is enough to heat 250,000 homes. (Source: City of Urbana)

Using recycled instead of virgin paper for one print run of the Sunday edition of The New York Times would save 75,000 trees. (Source: Kingwood Green)

100 million trees are cut down every year to make the paper for “junk mail”. One-half of junk mail is thrown away unopened and unread. (Source: Kingwood Green)

Americans throw away 25 trillion Styrofoam cups that cannot decompose or be recycled. (Source: Do Something) Locally here in Texas there is a group organizing recycling projects in support of America Recycles Day – Nov 15th 2009. For more information check out their site: http://www.texasrecyclesday.org/

Since 1950, Canadians have consumed as much as all the generations before us combined. (Source: Recycling 101)


In North America we produce enough garbage each day to fill 70,000 garbage trucks. Lined up bumper to bumper, over a year, they would stretch halfway to the moon. (Source: Recycling 101)

On average, every person in the UK throws away their own body weight in rubbish every 7 weeks.
—Recycle Now

This information will really open your eyes to what we waste. I think there is a way to stop junk mail, but I’ll have to do some research and get back to you on that. If you have any idea’s how to stop all this wastefullness, leave a comment so we can spread the info.

Thanks for  reading!

Type to you later.