 Each person in the United States uses approximately 750 pounds of paper each year. This equals approximately 187 billion pounds per year.
4 billion trees are cut down each year just to satisfy the world’s paper needs. This amount represents only 35% of the actual trees cut down.
The world consumes approximately 300 million tons of paper each year.
Between 70 and 100 percent of trees used to make newspapers are cut from virgin forests.
Ninety percent of all logging in Canada is clear cutting.
There are 1,580 daily newspapers in the U.S. with a circulation total of 61 million. There are 875 Sunday newspapers with a total circulation of 62 million.
The New York Times Sunday Edition alone uses approximately 75,000 trees per edition.
Only 10% of the global paper stream goes into “cultural memory”.
The world consumes five times more paper now than in 1950.
Most of the world’s paper supply, about 71 percent, is not made from timber harvested at tree farms but from forest-harvested timber, from regions with ecologically valuable, biologically diverse habitat.
Tree plantations host about 90 percent fewer species than the forests that preceded them.
Global production in the pulp, paper and publishing sector is expected to increase by 77% from 1995 to 2020.
Industrialized nations, with 20 percent of the world’s population, consume 87 percent of the world’s printing and writing papers.
Of the global wood harvest for “industrial uses” (everything but fuelwood) 42% goes to paper production, a proportion expected to grow by more than 50 percent in the next 50 years.
The paper industry is the largest consumer of forests in the Southern US, currently logging an estimated 5 million acres of forests (an area the size of New Jersey) each year.
75% of the tree plantations established in the last 20 years have been established at the expense of natural forests.
More than 40 percent of logged trees is used for paper.
All recycled papers now account for less than 10 percent of the paper market.
|
