1) The world produces about 400 million tons of paper and pulp per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_and_p...
2) Given that only about 10% of that is from recycling, the rest has to come from about 6 billion trees per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_recyc...
3) There are, however, something like 400 billion trees in the world (I suppose this means the equivalent, averaging over many sizes and species, of 400 billion "standard" pines").
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...
So paper and pulp use up about 1.5% (= 6/400) of the world's forests each year. Still seems like more trees than we can grow in a year, since a standard pine might take 100 years to reach maturity (though probably much less time is needed for harvesting a commercially viable tree grown in a tree farm by a paper company). http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_long_does_...
Especially since wood is needed for other purposes too, not just for paper.
However:
1) Recycling is on the increase.
2) So is paper-less communication and record-keeping
So, it would seem we ARE cutting down trees faster than we are replacing them, but at a pace that is probably sustainable for a long time and the trend would seem to be towards cutting=replacement in the not-too-radically distant future.
EDIT: Oh my warmonia! I FORGOT that CO2 is plant food, so more CO2 will help trees grow faster!
THAT must be the global warming CONNECTION to this question! Musta been Al Gore and time-traveling-Arrhenius and his Rothschildian Proctol Elder Reptilians that befuddled me.
We have a new ploy in the UK. Because we are concerned about the climate and our carbon footprint we have decided to make some of our coal-fired power stations "sustainable" (e.g. Drax - our largest.) To this end, they are not going to use the nearby coal any more. They are going to use "sustainable" wood pellets. Coal is comparitively safe but wood pellets can catch fire if not stored properly. Of course, they do need to be stored because we cannot supply them from the UK - we buy them from the USA and ship them across.
Wood burns less cleanly than our coal so we will produce even more CO2 than before. Also, it does not heat as well as coal so you need to use more of it. You can't make this stuff up.
A better solution would be to burn the coal and plant trees as compensation - but what would I know? Still, the experts have decided that destroying the trees and producing even more CO2 is better. Go figure, as our American cousins say.
Oh yes we can. For every tree that is cut down three are planted. There are more trees in the US now then there were when Columbus came.
EDIT: If Jerry says four I will yield to that figure. My source was a Forest Ranger who oversaw the part of the forestry industry responsible for the wood for Bourbon barrels.
There's some small, fast growing types of trees that can be used for paper though they're not much good for lumber and so on
and paper can obviously be recycled of course
hell you could probably synthesize it or something if you had to
logging is way down , and most paper lumber come from what they call palp wood . short growth trees . Lumber is way down . we have more trees today with selective logging than in over 100 years. And with chip board and short growth logging , full linght lumber is not in the demand one would think.
it's called tree farming, for every tree they cut down they plant 4
Well thanks to CO2, trees are growing much faster and bigger these days, and Earths plant biomass is up about 15% from 1980 even taking deforestation into account.
We can't possibly be growing trees fast enough to keep up with all the paper used by the hundreds of huge companies in America alone. Is it part synthetic? Is some made from other sources?
