Papercrete And Me

One of the primary reasons for building with papercrete is to preserve trees. I was doing some research recently and came across some very disturbing statistics about trees.

We have been led to believe that with the increase in electronic communication and use of home and business computers that the use of paper would decline. After reviewing these statistics it can only be concluded that the opposite is the case.

Between the years 1995 and 2020 the global production of pulp, paper and the publishing sector is expected to increase by 77%.

The amount of tropical and sub tropical rain forests being converted to plantations is expected to grow 70% between 2000 and 2010.

Most paper is not harvested from plantations but from regions with biologically diverse, ecologically valuable habitats. 71% of the world’s paper comes from these old and irreplaceable forests.

90% of British logging occurs in ancient forests with over 40% of the harvest going to produce paper pulp.

Tree plantations host about 90% fewer wildlife species than the forests that preceded them, leaving habitat specific wildlife with no place to live.

In the US the paper industry is the largest consumer of forests, currently logging an estimated 5 million acres, equal to the size if New Jersey, each year.

75% of the plantations established in the last 20 years have been established at the expense of natural forests. The conversion of forests to plantations is the leading cause of freshwater wetland loss.

In Indonesia pulp production has quadrupled in the last decade with more than 1.4 million hectares of natural forests being replace with plantations.

Temperate rain forests cover only 2% of the earth’s surface.

SWITCHING FROM VIRGIN TO RECYCLED CONTENT HAS MANY BENEFITS

Each ton of recycled fiber that replaces a ton of virgin fiber:

• Reduces total energy consumption by 27%
• Reduces net greenhouse gas emissions by 47& and reduces particulate emissions by 28%
• Reduces waste water by 33%, reduces solid waste by 54%
• REDUCES WOOD USE BY 100%

In the United States we discard enough paper each year to build a wall 48 feet high around the entire perimeter of the country. Even though about 45% of discarded paper is recycled annually, 55% or 48 million tons of paper is thrown away or goes into the landfill. Figuring conservatively, it takes about 15 trees to make a ton of paper. That means that 720 million trees are used once and then buried in a landfill each year.

Using recycled paper in the form of papercrete to build low cost, well insulated, low tech, and earthquake resistant homes is one way to turn this prodigious amount of waste into safe and comfortable housing for the world’s growing population and in the process save millions of trees.

Tags:

This entry was posted by Judith on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 6:35 pm and is filed under What Was I Thinking???. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.