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Paper Facts

  • 1 ton of paper = 400 reams = 200,000 sheets1
  • 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets1
  • 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly)1

Printing Facts

  • Average cost of a wasted page $0.062
  • Average employee prints 6 wasted pages per day, that's 1,410 wasted pages per year!3
  • The average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year3
  • While 3 out of 4 office workers print from the Internet, 90% of people with a printer at home print Internet content4
  • 56% of people ages 45-54 print pages from the Internet for their archives, and only 33% of people ages 18-34 do the same4

Consumption

  • In 2004 the United States used 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams). That’s the equivalent of 178 million trees!5
  • The U.S. is by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average.6
  • In the United States, we use enough office paper each year to build a 10-foot-high wall that’s 6,815 miles long. That’s more than the distance from New York to Tokyo!7

Growth

  • Global paper products consumption has tripled over the past three decades and is expected to grow by half again before 2010.6

Energy

  • The U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry.8
  • Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months)9

Water

  • Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can.10
  • Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 19,075 gallons of waste water9

Waste

  • One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.11
  • In 2003, paper and paperboard accounted for 35 percent of the total materials discarded in the United States.12
  • Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 2,278 lb of solid waste9

CO2

  • CO2 prevented if all Fortune 500 companies use GP= 6,311,610 tons13
  • One hot-air balloon of 10m diameter contains about a ton of hot air - imagine seeing 6,311,610 hot-air balloons floating over the US - that's a lot of balloons!13
  • Production of 1 ton of copy paper produces 5,690 lb. of green house gases (the equivalent of 6months of car exhaust).9
  • Dumping paper in landfill adds methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes, with 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.14

Forests

  • In the U.S. we have lost 95 percent of our old growth forests.15
  • Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products. 16
  • 4281 acres of rainforest are lost every hour worldwide 17
  • It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper.9

Ink

  • If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,00018
  • If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink it would cost $5.9 billion.19

Tree Facts

  • A single mature tree can release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings.20
  • Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year.21
  • If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion lbs annually. This is almost 5% of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.22
  • According to the USDA Forest Service, a tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen, provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control, recycles $37,500 worth of water, and controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion, over a 50-year life span. 22

References

For more detailed information on the environmental impact of paper use and the alternatives check out this cool paper calculator created by Environmental Defense at papercalculator.org

GreenPrint’s Impact

  • A Fortune 500 company using GreenPrint would save over $2 million, 4000 trees and prevent 12,623 tons of CO2 emissions each year.
  • Over $6 billion a year would be saved if all US households with a computer used GreenPrint.
  • CO2 emissions would be reduced by over 117 million tons if all new computers used GreenPrint. That's the equivalent of removing 23 million cars from the road for an entire year.
  • 2 million trees would be saved every year if all the Fortune 500 used GreenPrint.
  • Over 36 million trees would be saved every year if all new computers sold in 2006 used GreenPrint.