Question No.  19585 :
On average, how many trees are cut down to produce one ton of paper?

How much paper can be made from a tree? Or alternatively, how many trees are needed to make a given amount of paper? It is not possible to give an average due to the different types of pulping methods and the grade of paper being used, and the size of the trees being saved. How can one talk about a "typical tree"? Paper is actually made from a mix of types of trees. Some are hardwood and some are softwood. In addition, some are tall, some old, some wide, some young, and some thin. Many of the "trees" used to make paper are just chips and sawdust. In addition, there are many types of paper, not just newsprint. It takes almost twice as much wood (trees) to produce one ton of copy paper than is required to produce one ton of newsprint. There are no simple answers to these questions, and any calculations that can be made would be no better than "ballpark estimates". For many years we have heard the statistic that "1 pallet or 1 ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees". This number was based on a report to US Congress in the 1970s and was calculated for newsprint, which is made in a totally different papermaking process than office and printing papers. Do numbers calculated 30 years ago still apply to today's much more efficient paper industry? It was the best number anyone had, so it became the number everyone used to calculate the number of trees saved by recycled paper or the number of trees that had to be cut to make virgin paper, no matter what type of paper they were talking about. Some typical data found in the literature are as follows: 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees. 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees. A "pallet" of copier paper contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton. 1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses 0.6 trees. 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets. 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree. 1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper uses a little more than 15 trees. 1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper uses nearly 8 trees. Question Asked By:

Name: STUDENT

Age Group: 6 to 12

Occupation Type: Student

Education Level: Primary