A Call to Go (Nearly) Paperless

Please consider the environment before printing this article.

On Election Day, millions of us went down to our corner newsstand to pick up a copy of the daily paper. The headlines spoke of history in the making, and we took home the printed pages as souvenirs commemorating the most exciting election of a generation. But for many, this was the first paper we've bought in years, and it may be the last.

Earlier this month the Pew Research center reported that more Americans are now getting their news from the internet than from newspapers -- not a terribly surprising announcement. About two-thirds of us have a home computer, and over 70 percent use computers at work. Online news is updated constantly, whereas the traditional daily news cycle is frozen for several hours each night during printing, dooming the print edition to be outdated by morning. Plus, most online news is free -- a quality that none of us can resist, particularly these days.

The advantages to giving up printed news are clear, but when it comes to kicking our addiction to other paper products most Americans aren't jumping on board. Paper permeates every aspect of our lives -- we use it at home, school and work, we wrap our food and gifts with it, read stories off it, and we put it to use when drying our tears and wiping our butts. We use and throw out more paper than any other material, and the pulpy stuff makes up a whopping thirty-two percent of all the tonnage entering our waste stream. Americans trash 83 million tons of paper per year, and we flush away an additional seven billion rolls of toilet paper on top of that. About half of the paper we throw out -- including newspaper, magazines, junk mail, packaging, office paper and cardboard -- gets recycled. The environmental benefits of recycling paper are huge, as producing a ton of recycled paper takes less than half as much water and energy as making paper from wood pulp.

Plus, recycling saves trees. It takes about 17 trees to produce a ton of paper, and often those trees are sourced from sensitive and essential ecosystems and carbon sinks like the Amazon Rainforest and Canada's Boreal Forest. When a tree is cut to make paper only about half of the wood is used for pulp, and recycling our existing paper supply is significantly more efficient and in some (and increasing) cases less expensive than producing new paper from trees.

Paper has an important place in our culture and hearts -- what would America be without dollar bills, postcards, cereal boxes, card games, trashy magazines and birthday parties colored with streamers and gift wrap? There's nothing more comforting than a paper trail -- paperless voting has been widely denounced and paper receipts and contracts serve an essential role in our economy and legal system. And although millions around the world have no use for paper in the bathroom, most Americans cringe at the thought of living without toilet paper and it's unlikely that our penchant for wiping will go away any time soon.

When it comes to these somewhat "essential" paper products that are simply not going away, the greenest option is recycling. There are currently no federal requirements governing how companies source paper materials, and federal leadership has been weak when it comes to setting limits on the use of virgin paper. To its credit, the Federal Government -- along with several states -- has adopted standards that require its offices to use paper made with a minimum percentage of post-consumer recycled content. Environmental organizations like NRDC and Greenpeace have launched campaigns urging large paper companies like Kimberly Clarke to increase their use of recycled content and put an end to sourcing wood pulp from virgin forests, but as of yet most companies source only a minimal percentage of their pulp from recycled paper.