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Even in our electronic age, paper is still with us. It brings us our morning news (some of us still arrive at work with ink-stained fingers), great literature and gossip magazines, personal hygiene and playing cards. But producing and disposing of paper has huge and wide-ranging environmental impacts, from damage to forests to energy and water consumption to air and water pollution and solid waste.
Unless you’re an expert, it can be difficult to sort out the complex environmental issues associated with paper production and disposal.
Using less paper is the obvious first step (and at the top of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” environmental hierarchy) but what’s next? You want to include postconsumer recycled content, but how much is available in the grades you need? You want to protect endangered forests, but which certification schemes are credible? What about toxics in paper production – how do you avoid those? And where can you find paper that meets your environmental criteria? All great questions, but one that you might not have yet asked is What’s in Your Paper?
What’s In Your Paper is an online resource for businesses and individuals who want to reduce the environmental impact of their paper use.
It offers a comprehensive purchaser toolkit including model purchasing policies, letters to suppliers, specifications for environmentally preferable papers and links to additional resources such as Canopy’s eco-paper database, Conservatree’s paper listings and EDF’s Paper Calculator. What’s In Your Paper is produced by the Environmental Paper Network – a coalition of several hundred national and international NGOs working for a more sustainable paper industry.
Paper purchasers large and small have the power to shift paper production in a positive direction, one that leads to systemic reductions in environmental impacts. But they need to know how.
Until paper comes printed with the environmental equivalent of a nutritional label, you need to ask what’s in your paper. Now you can use Whatsinyourpaper.com to get answers.
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