Ah, the daily rag. Where coffee revives and cigarettes embolden, newspapers round out the holy breakfast trinity, infusing us with knowledge, blackening our fingertips as though they’ve touched the fires of wisdom.
(OK, it’s just newsprint. But we journalists tend to get excited about it.)
Folks like you probably read the Gray Lady on the Internet. Yet, more than 50 million newspapers hit stands and porches every morning in this country (double that in China).
So, newspaper subscriber, when she is delivered to your door, pick up your inky friend and ponder her amazing journey:
A tree falls. Many trees, really–200 million per year, just for newspapers. These aren’t ancient rainforest trees but rather young, fast-growing woods, such as the eucalyptus pictured above, planted for the purpose of harvesting (often replacing native eco-systems).
The trees are transported to a paper mill for cleaning and pulping, a 150-year-old process involving heat and a lot of grinding. The pulp is washed, bleached and literally goes through the ringer. The resultant waste winds up in landfills or your local bodies of water. The entire process of refining trees into smooth, lightweight paper comes at a high energy cost and produces serious carbon dioxide emissions (that contribute to global climate change).
Finally, the paper is baled, transported and stored until a newspaper press covers it in black carbon ink.
Happily, the EPA reports that 88% of newspapers are recycled–a high-energy process (transporting, de-inking, re-bleaching, shredding, pulping) but certainly preferable to altogether junking them. Newspapers still comprise 6.3% (13.1 million tons, about a fifth of which is pesky ad inserts) of our solid waste, with paper products in general accounting for more than a third of our total waste stream.
According to the Environmental Defense’s online "paper calculator," 2,600 Sunday papers (say, to supply a town of 10,000 where one in four residents reads the paper) taxes Planet Earth 16 trees, 54 million energy BTUs (enough to power your home for 6 months), 10,135 pounds of carbon emissions (a year’s worth for most cars), 27,562 gallons of water and 3,434 pounds of solid waste.
So, what can be done at the personal level, aside from relying solely on web versions of your must-reads? A while back, Sarah decreased her newspaper delivery from daily to weekends-only–her employer gets a paper delivered, easily providing a weekday fix for the whole office. At home, she doesn’t waver on recycling newspaper and makes sure to suspend delivery service when going out of town. Simran reads it online and borrows the hard copy from her neighbor when she needs a paper fix.
What about you? We’d love to know who here still "takes the paper."
This post was written by
and
, and was originally published on
. Thanks to the
University of Kansas School of Journalism
and Lacey Johnston for research assistance.
i encourage the spread of paperless news for a few reasons.
* with paperless news i have more control of when, where and what i consider news. if i find news to be more of a negative nature i can not avoid it and reduce the use of this type of news. allowing me more energy to focus my attention more on news rewarding to the collective. that isn't always possible with a newspaper.
* paperless news allows more individuals to be the reporters. this may allow for more negative news to circulate but opens to more possiblity of positive news and possible solutions to the negative events that are bound to happen in our world.
*i can be more conscious of the collective world and not just isolate my knowledge to one section of the world. opening my knowledge to lots more.
Nicely informative. If I were to have guessed the impact of newspapers on the environment, I'd have said it was negligible.
However, I have to say that it is sad to see daily papers struggling to the extent they are. To see a journeyman's world disappear.
My old man was a neon sign repairman. Even as I was growing up, his business was fading due to the prominence of flourescent/plastic signs, the next modernity. Mostly corner bars and old furniture stores stuck with him.
Neon was a craft, hot glass bent to font drawn on sheets of asbestos. Large bulbs of inert gases, each a different color, filling words with buzzing luminoscity. Black paint dabbed to fill the spaces in between. Snapping current that could put you on your ass if you were careless.
I can't imagine printing to be that much different at all. A job well done.
Oh well.
We're still printing money, at least.
And lots of it.
Oh yeah, I forgot: the local catholic church had a stone grotto framed in neon. We had to carefully step over the virgin and her newborn to do our work, my old man and I. The parish priest looked on approvingly. Few have ever had the opportunity of this sort of relationship with Jesus.
(Imagine the stories that delivered newspapers!)
A paperless world..?
Thanks for such an informative article Simran, as a journalist it takes some courage, or is it simply that the world is evolving and this is the way forward?
More and more of us here in South Africa add the following on the bottom of all emails;
Thank you for bringing up the issue of using newspapers as environmentally damaging, I don''t think they're as bad as what the main culprit of deforestation is, though. I don't like the clutter of paper, and prefer the ease of surfing for my news. But as you mentioned in your article, most newspapers are recycled and come from renewable, controlled forests. The real forest bandits are coming from mass globalization, more people in the global market consuming more products, more food, meaning more forests are being chopped down for cattle grazing, soy, corn, and sugar cane crops. These crops do not hold nearly the amount of CO2 that trees do so the redistribution is uneven.
As more countries jump on the biofuels bandwagon, deforestation increases at an alarming rate. And as more people, through globalization, are brought into the middle class, more people are consuming, more people are driving, and more people are looking for alternative sources of fuel, and more people think biofuels are the way out.
However, they are causing the release of millions of pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere and not offering alternate CO2 sponges, destroying habitats, depleting potentially llife saving plants that only exist within these forests, and they are raising food prices for those who have the least affect on the environment.
I'd say that newspapers aren't as grossly offensive to the environment as those that contribute to them. The reporters who refuse to make environmental issues a real priority in this country. Perhaps if more reporters actually reported on the issue of climate change, we would already have a more energy choices that had 0 impact on the environment.
Thank you, Charli, and you're right to point out the many other causes of deforestation