It's a pretty well made video, and makes some good points, but it also misses quite a bit (possibly intentionally). It's a good question, though!
The issue with paper is not so much its source from sustainable wood, but the immense amount of energy intensive processing that goes into grinding, bleaching, and pressing, and drying it into paper as well as the decomposition when it is thrown away (into methane). I'm not sure what the carbon footprint of that looks like.
Wood itself, as a raw material (or lightly processed) for building is probably much better.
That said, there's no need to freak out about a little paper use, but at least make sure you recycle it or store it.
miniboes wrote:
In this video, the argument is made that if we consume more wood/wood products, more trees will be planted. The presence of trees is, of course, awesome.
More trees cut down and planted, and it's possible forestry companies would invest in new land and plant trees where there had been none. Trees capture carbon. I'm not sure if they capture more carbon than is released in processing something like paper, though. In the case of wood houses, they probably do since it's actually sequestered in the structure for quite a while. It's a good question.
miniboes wrote:
This makes sense to me, and clearly the majority of deforestation is the result of making space for crops and livestock, not for paper production.
Correct. It mostly comes down to animal agriculture. Green peace is terrible on that front; they want to stop people using paper, but don't blink at people scarfing down unlimited quantities of meat.
I appreciate the criticism that guy was able to make in the video about environmentalists, although it would have been nice to see a little wag of the finger at wasteful animal agriculture.
miniboes wrote:
But does this really mean buying paper is good for the environment? Should one be looking for trademarks like FSC (Forest Stewardship Council)? Apparently an FSC trademarked forest region is chopped down and then given 30 years to recover. It seems to me that's a very sustainable practice.
If you can find a mark indicating sustainable forestry, that's good. I think most wood products are, though.
That doesn't guarantee that the energy input into making the paper is less polluting than the trees needed to make it captured though.
Also, when you throw that paper away, it's not clear what happens to it in a landfill: there's a lot of methane production that goes on there, and any organic product is a potential source.
http://www.paperrecyclingcoalition.com/ ... l-warming/
1. Paper recycling prevents methane emissions from landfills.
First, when paper is not recycled, 80% of it ends up in landfills. Decomposition of the paper in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas with 21 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide (CO2). U.S. EPA has identified landfills as the single largest source of methane emissions in the U.S., and the decomposition of paper is the largest contributor to the methane being generated.
If paper is recycled, it doesn’t end up in the waste stream, headed for a landfill where it will degrade and generate methane. Simply put, the less paper landfilled, the less methane emitted.
