school energy&environment

Sustainable paper

Until the past century paper was generally made from rags, rope or hemp, a method which went into crisis especially due to continuous epidemics of plague which drove people to burn contaminated clothes and rags causing a drastic reduction in raw material. To make paper, a valid substitute for rags is certainly wood which has much lower costs. The best paper is made from some conifers such as firs and pines or broad-leaved trees such as eucalyptus, birch and poplar.
Also other types of trees, though, are currently used: in Indonesia, for example, trees are drawn directly from the tropical forest to create MTH cellulose (Mixed Tropical Hardwood). The quality of this paper is poorer but with no doubt it’s less expensive to cut a forest of full-grown trees rather than planting more suitable trees as acacias and waiting for them to grow.
This has led to the destruction of thousand of hectares of forest not only in Brazil, as public opinion might think, but also in countries as Canada, Indonesia, Finland, Russia and Africa. If we consider that two thirds of animal and plant species have their habitat in various forest ecosystems and that woods and forests produce oxygen which is absolutely indispensable for our existence along with water, which is another primary resource in great danger, it’s easy to understand that we absolutely need to implement a change in our behaviour as introducing the use of recycled paper or FSC certified paper (Forest Stewardship Council).