Paper and Packaging Products Are The Right Choice

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - When people buy paper products, they are doing the earth a favor. That's because paper products are manufactured with wood fiber - the one natural resource in the world that can regenerate itself in harmony with the environment. The best news is we are growing more wood fiber than we use. The forests are growing - not disappearing. There are 12 million more acres of forests in the U.S. today than 20 years ago. Since 1965, the number of trees growing in U.S. forests has increased 39 percent, considering that in the same period of time our population has nearly doubled.

Unlike other raw material, the rapidly growing trees we use to produce wood fiber are perpetually grown and re-grown in forests managed for that purpose. As long as there is sunlight and well-managed forestland, we will have a limitless supply of wood fiber. And, the more renewable wood fiber we use, the less we'll need of alternative resources that will eventually run out.

Only wood fiber can guarantee that a world soon to hold 10 billion people will have the material we need to allow us to build our homes, safely package our food and communicate with each other - all without using alternatives that deplete our natural resources or damage the environment.

So "saving trees" is not the environmental answer - using more paper and packaging products with wood fiber is.

Jay James
Division Manager
xpedx / Dallas

Beijing says water a "severe test" it can pass

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's capital has been "severely tested" in ensuring there will be enough safe water for the 2008 Olympics but is sure that recycling run-off and tapping additional sources will avoid shortages, a city official said.

Beijing lies in the country's arid north, a region where urban growth, industrialization and pollution have strained supplies, forcing the city of 16 million to draw increasingly on declining underground sources.

With the Olympic Games opening in August set to lift demand, Beijing has turned to neighboring Hebei province, enduring a long drought, to supply 300 million cubic meters of "back-up" water through a network of canals.

Northern China has had very little rain or snow throughout the winter, adding to worries. But Zhang Shouquan, a deputy chief of the Beijing water bureau, said athletes and visitors could expect clean, full supplies for pools, taps and a big scenic lake.

"How to ensure water supplies for the Olympic Games period has been a severe test for us," Zhang told the Chinese-language Sohu news Web site (news.sohu.com) in an on-line interview.

"Now our water quality is fine and we can absolutely guarantee supplies for the competitions ... We can certainly ensure the water-quality security for athletes."

Zhang gave apparently contradictory numbers for supply and demand, saying that Beijing planned to supply 3 billion cubic meters of water in 2008, which he said was "much higher than the past year." But he also said that in recent years Beijing had consumed up to 3.5 billion cubic meters of water a year.

"The problem we have now is that, as well as shortfalls in water sources, there is also severe pollution of the aquatic environment," Zhang said. "Our task in cleaning up water is extremely arduous."

But a combination of increased water-saving and recycling, the planned extra supplies from Hebei and tapping underground sources would ensure that the spike in demand could be met, Zhang said.

Critics including Dai Qing, a prominent Beijing environmental advocate, have said that the Olympic Games projects are badly straining aquifers, which have already fallen sharply in recent years.

But Zhang appeared to suggest that pumping underground supplies could be safely increased -- for a while.

"We still have abundant underground water," he said. "Although there may be some situations of shortages, we can absolutely guarantee providing water sources under safe transfer conditions for a period of time."

(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Erosion Takes a Toxic Toll in Alaska

January 30, 2008

It has been widely reported that global warming threatens to sweep scores of coastal Alaskan towns into the sea.

Now, the Anchorage Daily News reports that severe erosion is also threatening the ocean by dumping toxins from landfills and garbage dumps into the water.

"A (dump) is kind of like a Pandora's box of surprises," said Tamar Stephens of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, the Daily News reported.

Among the materials of concern are heavy metals and biological contaminants.

The U.S. military has spent millions of dollars to try to halt the erosion at Cold War-era landfills, but funding is in short supply for many small town dumps and some former military bases.

At least five military bases threated by tidal erosion have no cleanup scheduled, the paper reported.

The Baltimore Sun reported on the quest of Stanley Tom, a resident of Newtok, Alaska, to try to raise funds to relocate his entire village.

The mostly Native American town is in such a precarious situation that the next big storm could wipe it out, activist Deborah L. Williams told the Sun.

"The situation is very urgent," she told the newspaper. The area's permafrost is "melting like chocolate ice cream in the sun."

Newtok is just one of 180 Alaskan towns that are threatened with extinction as increasingly rapid erosion sweeps them into the ocean.

Historically, sea ice has protected the land from the brunt of winter storms, but scientists say that global warming has reduced the amount of sea ice, causing erosion to accelerate.

--Will Crain/Newsdesk.org

Sources:

"Fierce erosion sweeps wastes into Alaska waters"
Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 18, 2008

"Warming menaces Alaska villages"
Baltimore Sun, Jan 13, 2008

China's Pollution Problem Goes Global

Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?

By Jacques Leslie

WESTBOUND ON THE EASTBOUND BEIJING EXPRESSWAY

Long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.

Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.

I already knew that China's roads are some of the world's most dangerous. A quarter of a million people die on them each year—6 times as many as in the United States, even though Americans possess 18 times as many cars—and the entire system is plagued with soul-withering traffic jams prompted by police inspectors who extract "fees" from coal-truck drivers. Lines of trucks often extend behind inspection stations for miles; truckers have waited in them for as long as two weeks.000 And now we couldn't get on the expressway because traffic was at a standstill behind a toll station. An abhorrer of inertia, Mr. Zhang cut across six lanes to the only booth with a short line and cockily paid the toll. For a moment we basked in his NASCARish dexterity. Then he slammed on the brakes. In front of us, the road was clogged with coal trucks lined up behind an inspection station far down the road. We'd been funneled into a classic Chinese bottleneck.

Unfazed, Mr. Zhang made a 180-degree turn and headed west on the eastbound expressway. I braced for the inevitable crash. Then, just before we regained the toll station, he swung right and headed for the center divider, past a gigantic, disabled semi stuck perpendicularly to the flow of cars. The half-dozen policemen who stood around the truck gave no sign of noticing us. Through a gap in the divider, Mr. Zhang found an eastbound lane reserved for passenger cars and turned into it; as we sped toward Beijing, we saw that the line of motionless coal trucks extended for miles. Drivers dozed or ate dinner on top of their cargo. On this tottering foundation, the world's most dynamic economy has been erected. What globalization offers, it also takes away.

To read the rest of the article go to MotherJones.com

Top 10 Environmental Searches of 2007

Thursday, 13 December 2007

2007 may go down as the year people stopped talking about the climate crisis and actually did something about it.

Environmental awareness gained momentum over the year, which marks the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol.

1. Recycling
2. Global Warming
3. Freecycle
4. Earth
5. Pollution
6. Al Gore
7. Environmental Protection Agency
8. Live Earth
9. Hybrid Cars
10. Solar Energy

In February, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award and brought global warming front and center. Throughout the summer, buzz on "stop global warming" boomed, and conscientious citizens looked to reduce their carbon footprint.

Another familiar eco-issue on the minds of searchers this past year was pollution, from water to air. Clearly, rising oceans and falling air quality are concerns, and people used Search to monitor what the Environmental Protection Agency was doing about them and look into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

Closer to home, hybrid cars, solar energy, and recycling programs proved popular. And Freecycle.org, a social networking approach to local recycling emerged a hit as consumers sought to exchange used goods in their neighborhoods. (Take that, landfills!)

In terms of sheer search volume, residents of the Big Apple proved the most interested in global warming, edging out the environmentally conscious San Francisco Bay Area. When it came to hybrid cars, Los Angeles posted the most searches. Whether that's out of concern for the planet or frustration over gas prices and gridlock, we can't really say.

2007 saw queries on global warming reach their highest level ever, as searchers acted on their environmental concerns. Feel free to do your part and recycle the top 10 list by emailing it to a friend.

From www.Zegreen.com

How To Shop Green

Considering "going green"? You're probably not the only one.

Enter almost any grocery store and you're bound to find so-called green cleaning products next to traditional ones. Take Tide Cold Water detergent. Procter & Gamble (nyse: PG - news - people ) claims it deep cleans clothes in cold water, cutting down on your energy use, not to mention your energy bill. Car buyers have plenty of environmentally friendly models from which to choose, and energy-efficient appliances get prominent placement on showroom floors.

Even retailers are getting in on the act. Sweden-based fashion emporium H&M introduced a green line in spring 2007, offering frocks and tops made with organic cotton. And Nike (nyse: NKE - news - people ) recently announced plans to make its footwear sustainable, vowing to adopt environmentally friendly production methods where possible.

In Pictures: How To Shop Green

But while an ever-growing range of "green" consumer products are finding their way into our homes, there is very little in the way of industry standard. One manufacturer's green product may have been produced in an entirely different manner than another's. As a result, experts say it's good to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism when choosing environmentally friendly products, and to rely on a select group of organizations monitoring the practices of certain industries.

Do Your Homework
Dig a bit and you'll likely come across the word "greenwashing." This, according to Julia Cosgrove, deputy editor of ReadyMade, a San Francisco-based magazine that focuses on do-it-yourself, sustainable projects, entails marketing a product as environmentally conscious without enough evidence that it really is.

"Much of what we're seeing now is just spin," she says. "When you look further, many of these companies are still making a big environmental footprint."

Translation: Even if a retailer offers clothes made with organic cotton, chances are they are being shipped via huge, gas-sucking airplanes.

Another example is vinyl. It is used in a great deal of vegan shoes, but the production of the material can create dioxin, a known carcinogen.

Clothing company Edun has experienced a case of greenwashing. Although some of its products are made of organic cotton, the company's main objective is to produce ethical (fairly traded, socially responsible)--not green--clothing. Although both concepts are positive, they certainly don't mean the same thing. Edun is an ethical clothing company, and although they take measures to protect the environment, they should not be categorized as green.

How to tell one from the other? Look to several watchdog organizations for a real education.

Digging Deeper
Netherlands-based Made-By tracks a garment's environmental footprint from the first thread on, and the International Forest Stewardship Alliance certifies wood-made products by ensuring that manufacturers collecting lumber are making the best use of forest resources, reducing damage and waste, and avoiding overconsumption and overharvesting. You can find a complete listing of their findings on www.fscus.org.

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) labeling system, Design For The Environment (DfE), ensures that the chemicals in DfE-certified products--like Earth Choice's new range of household cleaners--are environmentally preferable, which means such products are created with lower volatile organic compounds. High levels of these materials can damage soil and groundwater, and emit greenhouse gasses, contributing to global warming.

Kitchen appliances now possess one of the most widely recognized labels, EnergyStar, another EPA-run unit. These labels ensure an appliance meets energy-efficient guidelines set by the EPA and the Department of Energy. Criteria for each appliance differs and can be found on www.energystar.gov under the Products tab.

"It's a fairly well-known metric that will reduce your energy use and save you money," says Ron Jones, founder of Greenbuilder, a development, media and consulting firm dedicated to sustainable development and green building, of EnergyStar. Often, buying a new, energy-saving air conditioner will save you in the end since older models not only cost more to run but often don't work as well.

Whether you're buying one piece of green clothing or remodeling your entire home with energy-efficient appliances, Jones says it's important to note how your everyday activities affect the environment.

"If you start to look at a person in terms of their individual footprint, which includes their transportation habits, eating habits, clothing and housing, it starts to get very complex," he says. "Think through everything. Determine how it will affect your everyday living conditions, and your quality of life going forward."

*from Forbes.com via KCBD Lubbock News

U.S. Paper Industry Working to Preserve Our Forests

The U.S. paper industry is working to clean up environmental excesses of the past and is planting new trees to replace the ones harvested for paper products.

According to Domtar Paper, thare are more U.S. trees today than 70 years ago. The paper industry's forest lands are no longer shrinking. Of the 873 million acres that supply commercial paper products (that's five times the area of Texas), only 2% are harvested each year. Great news when you consider that one tree produces 260 pounds of oxygen each year-enough to support two people.

Domestic printing papers are a smart green buy because they conform to stricter environmental standards in the U.S. and support sustainability of our forests.

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