Green Paper Products Need to Compete With Regular Paper to Be Competitive With Big Industry

[baqirkhatri]

Recycled paper is good for the environment because it reduces the requirement for forest harvesting but recycled paper has limits. Recycled paper cannot compete well with regular paper. Green products need to go head to head with regular paper and tree free paper is up to that challenge.

There is no doubt that the high demand for pulp and paper products had impacted heavily on the forests. The hardest hit forests have been the trees that require forty to fifty years to attain maturity again. The big paper industry calls forest products a renewable resource but just how renewable is a turnaround cycle of five decades? Thai Unryu Mint Green

The big paper industry slowly responded to public demands by including products that contain a fractional percentage of recycled material. I guess we are supposed to applaud the fact that some green paper is being turned out but I say it's too little and too late.

The big problem with using recycled paper is quality of the end product. A recycled paper product that is made with 100% recycled paper looks and feels like it's made with recycled material. A paper made with recycled paper can have the quality improved but at the expense of extensive processing and bleaching that makes it too expensive to compete and which has itself a larger impact on the environment by the bleaching agents required. Basically, recycled paper is in a no win situation as far as competing with the big paper industry.

The situation for green paper has been bleak but not anymore. There is a new tree free paper coming on strong and it can be a contender with conventional paper. To call this tree free paper though, a person has to think of bamboo as not being trees. If fact I would question whether the bamboo does really qualify as a tree. We call Bamboo a tree but it is really an exceptionally tall grass plant in that it has a hollow trunk like wheat or barley stems have. Trees with solid cores take many years to grow but a Bamboo grove shoots up like a weed in less than five years.

Bamboo is proving to produce paper that can compete with normal paper that costs generations worth of valuable trees. But bamboo isn't the only raw material that goes into tree free paper either. Bagasse is the fibrous material that remains after a sugar cane has been crushed to extract the sugar juice. Bagasse has been dried and then burnt in co-generation power plants. That is a green use of an otherwise waste byproduct and it saves burning wood, coal or fossil fuel but bagasse can also be used in the production of tree free paper products that are competitive with the best that the big paper industry has to offer.

Being a little green or having a small percentage of recycled paper included just doesn't cut it anymore. Tree free paper is competing head to head with the big guys on their own turf. Their turf is a stump field that used to be a forest. Tree free paper has another crop already reaching maturity for more green paper before the big paper industry has even replanted.