I crunched some numbers a minute ago, realizing that I am responsible for roughly 276 million square feet of paper being put into landfills in the last 3 years. By myself. (Not personally, at work mind you.) Also, some number close to 10 million square feet of plastic packaging as well.

I'm also responsible for around 2 barrels of industrial waste each month.

Nature takes it like a champ.

Baby killer!

Doesn't paper pretty much disintegrate and disappear, turning into microscopic food bits for nature, in a matter of weeks?

I would imagine most of it does, but then there's the ink and all the chemicals used in processing it.

It's not regular paper, it's label stock for a web press, so it also has plastic non-stick backing that goes with it. So you could effectively double that number. Not to mention the bottles/buckets they go on.

edit: also, in before crying Indian.

Cutting down trees is pretty high up on the list of **** that doesn't matter at all. We grow trees specifically for the purpose of cutting them down. If you are throwing away your paper instead of recycling it, then yes you're an ass hat

I think that environmentalists are more concerned w/ the cutting down of trees than the rate at which paper decomposes but I could be wrong.

You lie!

Cutting down which trees? Foresting a rain forest is one thing, cutting down trees in tree farms is another.

I recycle at home and at work. Especially at work. As a school teacher, we go through craploads of paper.

However, I didn't start recycling at home until the city finally began a recycling program. I would guess that at home we recycle about 1/3 of all our household waste. It could be more, but they don't take glass or styrofoam, and the recyclables have to be "unsoiled".

I look outside and I see a **** ton of trees. Crews are constantly cutting them away from powerlines. The outside lanes on the highways are in full shade. Two lane roads might as well be tunnels.

And then I realize that during the civil war, this area was entirely deforested. The union army cut down all the trees.

I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject but I ran across a few statistics after this thread was created & it appears that "most of the world’s paper supply, about 71 percent, is not made from timber harvested at tree farms but from forest-harvested timber, from regions with ecologically valuable, biologically diverse habitat[s]."

http://www.environmentalpaper.org/PAPER-statistics.html

I also found the following link which also had some interesting statistics. I don't know much about this issue but these sources seem to rely on the same statistical information that's available via dozens of like websites.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/7447

It's the same here in Kentucky (probably in most places in the U.S.). We only have 1 or 2 old growth forests left in this state. It doesn't appear that the government really took any of this seriously until the Roosevelt administration (e.g: USACE).

Were you lookin for me?