One of my loves is paper and I print quite a bit. After seeing the rising cost of paper, I started wondering if paper was cheaper and what quality was available, if I bought recycled paper vs. virgin paper (all new wood fibers).

First I found that there are some “qualifications” to what you would call recycled or earth friendly papers.

• Recycled content paper-paper milled with a percentage of recycled paper, calculated from 10% to 100% of pre-consumer (paper not disposed by consumers) or post-consumer (paper recycled after purchased, used and disposed of by the consumer)
• Forest Stewardship Council paper-”managed” forest have a few trees cut down to avoid overgrowth and used in the paper industry, producing “virgin” paper.
• Sustainable Forestry Initiative paper-Same as above
• Paper produced carbon neutral-These companies reduce and offset (reduction through energy diversification) their carbon emissions.
• Paper produced using wind power-Paper mill is powered using wind power.
  

  Carbon Neutral Resource Energy

• Tree Free content paper-Alternative fiber source is used in the paper
• Elemental Chlorine Free paper-Adding chlorine in the paper making is done to brighten pulp, resulting in brighter, whiter paper.

Okay that was a mouthful! Now is that helping in any way the forests? Here is what I found:

• Space is saved in our landfills when we recycle paper products more than any other materials and each piece of paper can be recycled up to five times before the fibers become too weak . 1(Yesterday I watched a show that said seven times)
• 44 million newspapers are disposed of each day here in the U.S. Sadly it`s  like throwing 500,000 trees into a landfill each week. 2
• Recycling one ton of paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil and 7000 gallons of water! 3
• If  one person was to reuse a paper grocery bag for just one trip to the store, we would save 60,000 trees. 4 Imagine the trees we could be save if we all chose reusable cloth shopping bags instead! (Cited in part-Leah Thorpe)

The bottom line-$$$

Virgin Paper Prices

Recycled Paper Prices- BTW, It`s $99.85 for 2500 sheets of recycled paper to $144 or virgin paper, same quantity.

Quality

I only could tell the recycled from the virgin when it hit my wallet. There was not quality difference.

When you are better informed, you can make better decisions. Having an ecofriendly business can cut cost drastically and relieve some of your monthly expenses. I really dislike a stuffy sales person who undermines the possibility I have researched this prior to purchasing paper. Just for fun, play dumb and cross check what information you get. You just might surprise yourself!

In my next article, I will show you how went from having a 260 dollar monthly light bill to a 60 dollar light bill-Pretty impressive huh??

Resources

• Buy Eco Friendly
• Trees as a renewable resource
• Hybrid Trees
• Trees and Paper
• They still think recycling doesn`t save trees
• Wind Power isn`t perfect

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