Dear Megan,
I am most happy to help an eco-advocate in distress. Let’s take each claim one by one.
Co-workers’ claim #1: Buying recycled products like paper towels and toilet paper is going too far.
Ask your coworkers if they’ve ever walked through a forest and stopped to pause under the canopy of one of the trees, leaned against its trunk and thought, “wow, I’d really like to cut this tree down and blow my nose on it.”
If you’ve bought “virgin” facial tissue, paper towels, napkins, paper plates, toilet paper, or other virgin disposable paper products, you’re wiping your nose, or cheek, or counter top, or your delicate areas with a tree – and it’s possible it’s a rainforest or old growth tree. If it doesn’t say that it is made with recycled content, it is extremely unlikely that it is.
According to Seventh Generation, a manufacturer of many different types of recycled paper products, if every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 500 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissue with 100% recycled ones, we could save: 1 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to 1,600 full garbage trucks, 153 million gallons of water, and prevent 423,900 trees from being flushed down the toilet.
Co-workers’ claim #2: Most paper is made from recycled paper and you don’t have to ask for it. Anytime it says “recycled” it’s just a scam to make you buy it.
Oh, how I wish they were right about that one, and really, in a common-sense world, all paper products WOULD be made from recovered fiber. According to Conservatree, a nonprofit organization dedicated to converting paper markets to environmental papers, more than 90% of the printing and writing paper made in this country today is still virgin paper. Distributers say that mosts buyers believe they no longer have to ask for recycled because they assume all paper contains recycled content. As a result, demand and supply have gone down. To be sure you are buying recycled paper, look for the words “made from post-consumer recycled paper.” The term “post-consumer” indicates that it came from paper collected from programs like ours, as opposed to “pre-consumer” paper that is simply virgin fiber scraps recovered from the paper mill’s floor.
Coworkers’ claim #3: Recycled paper is actually more polluting to make than virgin paper.
Nope. According to the Worldwatch Institute, making paper from recycled content rather than virgin fiber creates 74 percent less air pollution and 35 percent less water pollution. The process is less polluting because the recycled paper industry uses more benign chemicals to whiten the fiber, such as hydrogen peroxide or sodium hydrosulfite, a non-toxic biodegradable bleach made from salt and oxygen. Virgin paper manufacturers typically use chlorine to whiten fibers, which creates dangerous toxins such as dioxin, furans and other organochlorines. Once loose in the environment, these chemicals accumulate in both people and animals. Hundreds of studies have shown a direct link between dioxin exposure and cancer, birth defects and developmental and reproductive disorders.
Bottom line, you can tell your coworkers that just by changing their buying decisions, they can change the world: prevent pollution, save resources, and create recycling opportunities for all of us by creating a demand for recycled material. (Not bad for just switching toilet papers, huh?) Simply put, the slogan goes, “If you’re not buying recycled, you’re not recycling.” Recycled products are available in many forms, from file folders and index cards to recycled decking lumber and ink jet cartridges. To learn more about the availability of recycled content paper, or to get more facts on the performance and quality of recycled paper products, visit www.conservatree.com. Other great sources of locally-available recycled content products are Eco-Products, Future Solutions, Inc., Hard Copy Solutions, and Amazing Recycled Products. For a list of local suppliers, see Eco-Cycle’s website at www.ecocycle.org .
