Washington State Leads the Way on Ecological Paper Procurement

Bravo to Washington State legislators and Governor Chris Gregoire for enacting on May 6th what is arguably the most ecologically progressive paper use and procurement law in the world. It is mind boggling to imagine the enormous ecological and economic benefits that would result if state and national governments around the world were to follow Washington's example.

According to the state's new law, all state agencies and colleges are required to purchase paper containing 100 percent post-consumer recycled content by the end of 2009. Moreover, any building with 25 or more employees must recycle 100 percent of the copy and printing paper produced at the building. To reduce paper waste, those offices must cut printing and copying use by 30 percent by July 2010.

Why is this so extraordinarily important? Why would it transform our planet if governments all over the world followed suit?

The paper industry has a huge ecological footprint: Perhaps no industry has forced more species into extinction, destroyed more habitats, polluted as many streams, rivers, and lakes, and caused as many taxpayer dollars to be spent on ecologically dangerous landfills and incinerators.

• The pulp and paper industry is the third greatest industrial emitter of global warming pollution in industrialized countries, after the chemical and steel industries, and an estimate published in 2000 projected that the industry's CO2 emissions will increase by roughly 100 percent by 2020.
• The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of freshwater used in the countries that comprise the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). About eleven percent of all water used in the 30 most advanced industrial countries goes just to make paper products--many of which, like toilet paper, are disposable products used only for a few seconds.
• Of all the wood harvested globally for "industrial uses" (everything but fuel-wood), more than 40 percent goes to paper production, a proportion that is expected to grow by 50 percent unless consumption patterns change. Deforestation causes more global warming pollution than all cars, buses, planes, ships and trucks in the world, combined.
• Wood-based pulp-and-paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as "major" generators of hazardous air pollutants, including dioxins and other highly toxic pollutants considered to be carcinogenic.

Buying paper made from post-consumer recycled fibers, as Washington State now requires, reduces all of those awful impacts. Making paper from paper instead of making paper from wood reduces the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per ton of paper produced, conserves water and mineral ores, saves energy, reduces the need for landfills and incinerators, and helps protect and expand manufacturing jobs.

Double-siding copies of documents, using printer-copiers that can fax and make PDFs without printing, reducing the amount of emails and other documents that are printed, widening margins and using a very slightly smaller font can all help save an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. The Warner Music Group has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by reducing its paper use and switching to paper made from recycled fibers.

Other countries use less paper than do citizens in the United States: U.S. citizens consume twice as much paper per capita as do citizens in other industrialized countries, and seven times more paper per capita than the world average. The average U.S. citizen consumes 100 times more paper than average citizens in India. Other nations recycle more of their waste and have adopted recycling policy measures much stronger than anything in place in the United States--this despite the fact that the United States is far and away the largest generator of wastes among all nations on Earth. The United States also maintains the highest per capita use of water and energy, two impacts that would be reduced if we recycled more.

Recycling can help reduce all of these large and adverse ecological impacts, which make U.S. industries less globally competitive and cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars annually. And recycling can help us address the other great ecological crisis of our time, biodiversity loss.

Washington State has set a gold standard. It has enacted what is arguably the most ecologically intelligent paper procurement law in the world. The White House--indeed, the rest of the world,--should take note. Paper is something that virtually everyone buys in some form, and changing the ecologically ignorant way it is made, shifting towards ecologically intelligent paper production, can go a long way towards solving many environmental problems.

To learn more about how to improve your paper use and buying practices, go to www.nrdc.org/paper.