No Paperless Office Yet

  • For five years, the environmentalist group Greenpeace held protests against the Kimberly Clark Corporation, maker of Kleenex tissues, for cutting Canada’s Boreal Forest and other forests around the world for its products. (Photo source: Wikimedia Commons)

When the computer-age took
off in the 1990s, lots of
people thought we’d use a
lot less paper. But that
hasn’t happened. Julie Grant
reports on why environmentalists
are so concerned about all
the paper we’re still using
in our offices and homes:

Transcript

When the computer-age took
off in the 1990s, lots of
people thought we’d use a
lot less paper. But that
hasn’t happened. Julie Grant
reports on why environmentalists
are so concerned about all
the paper we’re still using
in our offices and homes:

Allen Hershkowitz knew that the computer revolution wasn’t going to lead to a paper-less society. He’s been a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC, since people first started using email.

“Very early on, even at NRDC, we started to see people printing out documents that would otherwise have been retyped or emails that shouldn’t have been printed out.”

Hershkowitz says Americans use 7-times more paper than the average person on the planet. And computer printouts are just the beginning. Packaging, cigarettes, tissues and toilet paper – Hershkowitz has seen firsthand the devastation the demand for all that paper it’s causing.

“Ancient forests, forests that have existed way before Christ and Moses and Mohammed, for 10,000 years, are being cut down for toilet paper. A product we use for 2-3 seconds. This does not make sense.”

Hershkowitz says this deforestation causes more global warming pollution than all the trucks, buses, planes and ships in the world combined. He scoffs at products like 3-ply toilet paper, and compares using them to driving a gas-guzzling Hummer.

In Europe and Asia, much more of the toilet paper is made from recycled paper. Americans get beat up in the international press for allowing their delicate buttocks to devastate the world’s forests.

For five years, the environmentalist group Greenpeace held protests against the Kimberly Clark Corporation, maker of Kleenex tissues, for cutting Canada’s Boreal Forest and other forests around the world for its products. Greenpeace’s campaign against Kimberly Clark took late night political comedian Stephen Colbert by surprise.

Colbert: “Now for starters, who knew toilet paper came from trees? I always assumed it came from cartoon bears.”

Greenpeace recently ended their protests. Kimberly Clark agreed that by next year 40% of the fiber in their tissue products would come from recycled paper. But while environmentalists support this concession, it does not please Mr. Colbert.

Colbert: “Have you seen recycled toilet paper? Environmentalists, I swear, if you take away my plush toilet paper, I’m just going to use the next softest thing – spotted owls.”

Most paper makers aren’t opposed to using recycled material in their products. Dan Sandoval is an editor at the publication Recycling Today. He says most cardboard boxes and newspapers are already made from recycled paper.

And that recycled toilet tissue? He says that’s usually made from old office paper. The stuff we use for printing and writing. But a lot of times office waste is all thrown together – and isn’t clean enough to be recycled into something new.

“You know, when you’re collecting it all together here, you’re going to get some telephone books, some post-it notes and things like that that people are throwing together. Plastic windowed envelopes. Some of that stuff is like, it’s kind of iffy on that. So you get more material, but the quality goes down.”

Sandoval says that means the paper mills have to invest in a lot more cleaning equipment. And some times it costs more than just cutting down trees. Still, he says the trend for companies around the world is toward more recycled content. Environmentalists want paper companies to move faster.

And they say consumers also need to do their part. In the office, they want people to print less, and at home, they’re asking people to stop buying toilet paper that’s 3 layers thick.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Book Machine to Curb Paper Waste?

  • The Espresso Book Machine prints paperback books in about three to five minutes. (Photo by Suzanne Chapman)

Books are changing. Just like the music industry, books are going digital.
There are already those digital books you can read on a little handheld
device. Now there’s a machine that will print the book you want from a
digital file while you wait. Rebecca Williams reports the machine’s creators
say it could transform the publishing industry by making it a lot less
wasteful:

Transcript

Books are changing. Just like the music industry, books are going digital.
There are already those digital books you can read on a little handheld
device. Now there’s a machine that will print the book you want from a
digital file while you wait. Rebecca Williams reports the machine’s creators
say it could transform the publishing industry by making it a lot less
wasteful:

The makers of the Espresso Book Machine say it’s like an ATM for books. It
prints paperback books in about three to five minutes.

It’s a big metal and glass contraption with lots of little robotic parts on the
inside. Maria Bonn at the University of Michigan Library is showing me how
hers works. With a click of a mouse, she’s chosen a book file, and the thing
kicks into action.

(sound of a printer)

“This is standard laser printing on both sides of the paper… (TAP TAP TAP)
That tap, tap you hear is pages being lined up and put all into place.”

Everything happens so fast. I mean, I blink and it’s already printed the color
cover. Then the pages get rolled over this pot of orange glue, stuck to the
cover, and the whole thing gets trimmed down.

“You have to catch the book (SND of book dropping out) oops, which I
failed to do, and there’s your book!”

And just like that, I have my very own copy of “Stories of Ye Olden Time”
from 1895.

“It’s pretty indistinguishable from a paperbound book in a book store.”

And that’s exactly the idea.

Dane Neller heads up On Demand Books. It’s the company that makes the
machine and the software system behind it.

“Our overall vision is a radically decentralized marketplace where these
machines will be installed – could be coffee shops, libraries, bookstores,
cruise ships.”

There aren’t a lot of these things around yet. Just about 15 libraries and
bookstores have the machine. But there are about a million book titles
ready to go. And– if the book’s under copyright, the system automatically
sends off royalties to the right people. Dane Neller says these machines
could make the publishing industry more efficient.

“Most of the book industry is wasteful in that publishers built into their
model an oversupply of books because they factor it into their sales price.
Especially on the trade side, the bestsellers and books the general public
buys – typically that represents a 33 to 40% return factor.”

That means about 4 out of 10 books don’t get sold at bookstores. So they
get shipped back to publishers. Then they might get shipped out again to
somewhere like Costco, or Sam’s Club, or recycled – but they’re often
thrown away or burned.

Dane Neller says the book machine can stop all that extra printing and
shipping and waste – because you only print what you sell.

But he says bookstores will always need lots of copies of the big bestsellers
on hand.

“It will not replace centralized production because there will always be a
need to produce large quantities of single titles, the Danielle Steeles, the
large romance novels, that’s still much more efficiently done centrally. But
everything else can be done decentrally.”

So, when I walk into a bookstore in the future, there might be big stacks of
bestsellers, and then a few book machines – but not a lot of other books to
look at.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I don’t know what I want when I
walk in. I like to see what catches my eye.

Cynthia Ransley manages the Shaman Drum Bookshop. She says maybe the
book machines will help her industry make more money and be more
efficient.

But she says she can’t imagine not having a physical store where you can
spend hours just looking around.

“I think the book as an object is still a tangible part of people’s lives and
that’s where bookstores like ours really, you know, we have tons of
beautiful books and the way cover art has been improving and it becomes a
piece of art in and of itself.”

And that might never change. But what if you really need a book and it’s
out of print? Sometime in the near future you could go to a bookstore, do
a search, and just print it out.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links