The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [48]
Today, when we think of paper, we think of it coming from trees. However, paper has only been made from wood pulp since the 1850s.33 Before then—and still to some extent today—paper was made from agricultural crops like hemp and bamboo, and from rags and old textiles. The word “paper” comes from the Greek word (papyros) for papyrus, a writing material they developed by mashing strips of the papyrus plant. The first known piece of paper was made almost two thousand years ago by a Chinese court official, Ts’ai Lun, who used mulberry bush fiber, old fishing nets, hemp, and grass. In the fifteenth century, some books were printed on parchment, which is made from the specially prepared skin of sheep or goats, or on vellum, made of calfskin. It took the skins of three hundred sheep to print one Bible back then. Later, in the sixteenth century, cloth rags and linen were also frequently used as the fiber in papermaking.34 It wasn’t until much later—around the mid-nineteenth century—that large-scale wood pulp processing was developed, allowing trees to become the primary source for fiber with which to make paper, and hence books. (Not every book today is made from plant fibers: One exception is Bill McDonough’s book Cradle to Cradle, which was printed on plastic. E-books, of course, aren’t printed at all.) Paper can also be made from previously used paper. That’s recycling.
During all these hundreds of years, the basic steps of papermaking have remained the same. The fiber is mashed, flattened, and dried, and presto, you have paper. It’s not unlike art projects I do with my daughter where we put old paper, flower petals, and wrapping paper scraps in the blender with water, whir it up, pour the slurry onto a window screen, squish it flat, and lay it in the sun to dry. Just four categories of ingredients are needed: fiber, energy, chemicals, and water.
But this simple list is a little bit misleading. First, of course, there’s the problem of deforestation (see chapter 1 on extraction), including the less visible form of deforestation in which natural forests are replaced with plantations. Today, nearly half of the trees cut in North America go to making paper for everything from newsprint to packaging to stationery.35 Each year, about 30 million trees are used to make books sold in the United States.36 To give you a visual, there are about 26,000 trees in Central Park,37 so to make our books we use more than 1,150 times that number. Papermaking also uses vast amounts of energy and is among the top five emitters of greenhouse gases of all manufacturing industries.38 It requires huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals, which get mixed and released together into the environment.
No matter which source you start with—virgin trees, managed forests, agricultural crops, or recovered paper—part of the substance is useful and part is not. The desired part is the fiber. What are not wanted are the lignin, sugars, and other compounds found in wood and other plants. If the source is paper that’s being recycled, then most of the lignin is already removed, but the inks, staples, perfume inserts, and other contaminants have to be taken out.39 Unfortunately, each time the paper goes through this process, the fibers get worn down and shortened, so they can’t be recycled more than a handful of times.
The process of separating the useful fibers from the unwanted parts is called pulping. There are two main technologies used to make pulp: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical pulping involves chopping, grinding, or mashing the source material to separate the cellulose fibers from other compounds. Mechanical pulping is twice as efficient as chemical pulping, but the resulting fibers are short and stiff, which limits their use to a lower