Waste AM

Hi  joddle
The paper industry as had a bad reputation over the years ,Paper making is energy intensive, drawing larges amount of electricity from public utilities, or forcing mills to build their own power plants
Paper making uses a great deal of water, frequently from diminishing groundwater supplies.

Worldwide, enormous tracts of virgin forest are being felled for paper pulp production, contributing to the world’s tragic deforestation trends. Pulp and paper mills are large sources of standard air pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxides, carbon monoxides and particulates. These contribute to ozone warnings, acid rain, global warming and respiratory problems. Many of the mills are large enough to have their own coal-fired power plants, raising additional concerns about mercury, arsenic and radioactive emissions.

Many toxic chemicals are used in paper making, especially toxic solvents and chlorine compounds used to bleach and delignify pulp. Additional toxins are used as biocides to prevent bacterial growth in the pulp and finished paper products. (In the past, toxic mercury compounds were used as biocides, contributing to  mercury contamination problems in fish.) the list go’s on, but recycled paper can only be recycled one or twice because the fibres get two short and can no longer be used, and the process of recycling paper uses more chlorine than virgin paper, which doesn’t bode well for it’s green Credentials.

I think it’s a good idea to get a kindle or Ebook because it saves a awful lot of paper you can get thousand s of books on one unit with not much pollution in making the device… Offices  nowadays use a lot less paper than they used  due to the wide use of computers to but there’s always room for improvement.. In someways paper may be even worse then plastic, in polluting the environment and that’s saying something !  We should all use less paper considering all this damming evidence – it should not be considered a green product.

@Beverly I don’t yet have an ebook. I have an attachment to books in their printed form – probably something to do with having previously been a student of English. But going paper-free means I won’t buy any more new books and that I’ll stick to borrowing what I need or buying it second-hand on Amazon.

I think tablet PCs sound interesting because they allow you to write on the screen and make hand-written amendments to documents – this is an extremely useful adaption.

At the moment I don’t read enough to make an ebook handy. I have a netbook which I can take on journeys and write my blog posts on. It’s useful because I can do more with it than I could an ebook. I can go online or write blog posts as the mood takes me!

I was wondering if anyone has tried refusing receipts in a shop before? Most of the time I really don’t want or need a receipt when I buy an everyday item but I know the receipt gets printed anyway. I suppose if I don’t want a receipt that’s another reason to buy locally from independent retailers… Cutting out all these small bits of pointless paper use (that add up to a lot of paper) is something that I ultimately want to achieve.

I know receipts can be recycled but I want to focus on reducing my paper intake

I also have liked paper books in the past, before I was fully aware of the problems paper poses I have a laptop, which is very Adaptable and the battery lasts about six hours, but the screen is not like using paper books as you say and soon gives you a headache , I become very aware if I use it on public transport  etc, “May be a magnet for muggers,” but kindles are the nearest you can get to paper books,and you don’t get eyestrain and the batteries last months without charging , last but not least they are relatively cheap, “muggers not interested,” so you can use them with impunity,The main problem I get with paper products, out of my control is junk mail, or marketing fliers,we always send them back with the words not interested please don’t send any more, but we sill get loads more,from other company’s, with the yellow pages and the phone book we always say we don’t want them so we don’t get them,year on year, but world wide there must be millions of tons of marketing rubbish that nobody wants ,there should be legislation to stop all this happening, two years ago we started making our own paper from discarded bank statements etc. It’s very easy to do and the children like doing it, we use a Liquidiser to shred  the paper first, it saves a lot of time, theirs a lot we can do to Reduce our environmental impact not just  paper, if you put your mind to it, but it seems 99% of the population can’t be bothered, They seem to think it’s somebody else’s responsibility to take the initiative, or simply don’t care!.

I’m not going for a kindle or similar yet as I am not purchasing new books. I pick books up in charity shops and then pass them on or return them when I am finished.

I agree the volume of marketing junk is staggering. Companies seem very scared to switch over to e-marketing, perhaps for good reason, as I know a lot of people who still don’t use the internet and consider it unsafe to buy online.

Even though marketing with flyers and catalogues etc isn’t very effective I can see how retailers are tempted to do it. I have an email sign up list of people I contact when we have a Creative landscapes event. However, it’s very disappointing when you have gone to the effort to make a mailshot and the analytics tell you nobody opened the email to look at it! If you use paper leaflets you feel like you have done more to reach your audience somehow. But I’m not going to get leaflets printed anymore.

Making paper sounds fun. Is it useful paper to have or do you do it because it is an enjoyable craft? I have been interested to try this for a while because I have some handmade paper which is wonderful

Paper making can be fun, we tend to make christmas cards, birthday cards and thank-you cards, with flower  Petals etc in the paper,or if you use a fine screen, you can use usable paper for notes etc and can save on recycling,and all the problems we get with Commercial waste paper if people can be Bothered, and it can teach children how to work with there hands in a  Practical way, and get an end result for their labours, and not just plugged into some gaming device, which does not seem to serve any real purpose nowadays, but   Desensitised them to reality,? and the simple practical things in life! There seems a  disproportionate amount of children nowadays doing just that and not much else it seems?.

@Beverly thanks for the paper making tips. If I try it out I’ll let you know how it goes!