Wherever possible, we’re looking to find alternate ways to go about our everyday lives in a more eco-friendly way.
A big part of this is trying to scrub ourselves of plastics.
Being a natural resource, wood has become a go-to alternative, with wooden disposable forks being fine alternatives to plastic forks, for example.
So, what about refining what some already see as an eco-friendly enough product?
Paper and cardboard are vital resources around the world, but both require trees to be cut down to make. Furthermore, both tend to serve rather fleeting uses. Someone making notes will likely throw the paper away, and cardboard packaging invariably gets flipped into the recycling pile. While the power to recycle does make these resources far better than plastic, there’s room for improvement.
Making Paper For the Masses
To explain how paper is made from wood is to quickly reveal that the process can easily become environmentally unfriendly if strict sustainability measures aren’t enforced globally. Of course, for now, they’re not. To make paper, you cut down a softwood tree like a pine or spruce as you want the elastic, strong fibers. They get cut into logs and then thrown into a rotating drum to chip off the bark.
Next, pulp grinders chip the log into very small pieces with as much power as 50 cars, on average. All these bits get thrown into a process of mechanical or chemical pulping. The sheets of dried pulp then get shipped around the world to paper plants where it’ll be formed, pressed, dried, undergo calendaring, be reeled, get sized and coated, and then rolled.
This final paper plant process is different for all kinds of papers and cardboard, as is the pulping of choice. Chemical pulping tends to make that more premium product.
It’s the kind that you’d expect to see in live blackjack online playing card decks. As the cards need to keep shape, and the OCR needs to read the cards as well as the players through the stream, only the best will do.
Making Paper More Eco-Friendly
According to Brogaard et al. (2014) and similar studies into the carbon footprints of packing materials, cardboard, and paper comes out as the most environmentally friendly. Compared to Styrofoam, aluminum, and plastic, it’s the only one to have fewer kilograms of carbon emissions per kilogram of packaging at 0.94kg. Plastic clocks in at 3.5kg of emissions to 1kg of packaging.
What’s helping a great deal is the recycling process. While it is energy-intensive, and even chemical intensive, paper and cardboard aren’t single-use anymore, and more can be gained from each production if recycled. The recycling process is very similar to the initial pulping, drying, and then paper plant parts of the process. Some brands have already gone big on selling these recycled products, like Eco-Craft and Rhino Stationary.
There might yet be an even better way, though. Grass paper has been proposed as a better alternative to tree-sourced paper and card. Not only does it not require chemicals, but growing more locally would be possible around much of the world. The question would arise as to if it’s greener to grow meadows of grass or nurseries of trees. According to Eppendorf, the production of grass pulp is more eco-friendly in every regard.
Paper isn’t the most environmentally unfriendly product, but there looks to be a path being cleared to make it so. Maybe soon, paper and card will be even more eco-friendly and more wood will be available for other sustainable products.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aleksandra Djurdjevic
Senior Content Creator
Aleksandra Djurdjevic is a senior writer and editor, covering jewelry, accessories, and trends. She’s also works with services, home décor. She has previously worked as ESL teacher for English Tochka. Aleksandra graduated from the Comparative Literature department at the Faculty of Philosophy in Serbia. Aleksandra’s love for the environment, crafts and natural products over the years helps her continue to be a top expert at Wooden Earth.
