iBride is Environmentally Friendly Wedding Planner!

iBride - Environmentally Friendly Wedding Planner Of the global wood harvest for “industrial uses” (everything but fuelwood) 42% goes to paper production and most of the world’s paper supply, about 71 percent, is not made from timber harvested at tree farms but from forest-harvested timber, from regions with ecologically valuable, biologically diverse habitat. The paper industry is the largest consumer of forests in the Southern US, currently logging an estimated 5 million acres of forests (an area the size of New Jersey) each year.

Temperate forests are the most endangered forest type on the planet. Those rainforests only ever covered 0.2% of the world’s land surface, they are truly ancient forests and contain some of the world’s oldest trees. British Columbia is home to a quarter of the world’s remaining ancient temperate rainforests.

Worldwide, enormous tracts of virgin forest are being felled for paper pulp production, contributing to the world's tragic deforestation trends. Many Wisconsin mills import their pulp and undoubtedly some of this pulp came from old-growth endangered forests. Citizen networks have formed worldwide in an effort to save the last of these precious, irreplacable places. Remember, trees may be renewable, but ancient forest plant and animal communities are often not renewable because of the complex ecological balance which was built over thousands, even millions, of years in some of these forests!

One out of eight animal species in BC is at risk of extinction, according to the BC Ministry of Environment. Logging was identified as one of the primary contributing causes and over 40% of the trees cut in BC are used to produce paper.

Paper making uses a great deal of water, frequently from diminishing groundwater supplies. In the Green Bay area, the aquifer drawdown caused by excessive high capacity wells of the paper industry are a major cause of our municipal water woes, forcing local taxpayers to build expensive pipelines 30 miles to Lake Michigan.

The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of water used in industrial activities in OECD countries and is the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, after the chemical and steel industries.

Pulp and paper mills are large sources of standard air pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxides, carbon monoxides and particulates. These contribute to ozone warnings, acid rain, global warming and respiratory problems. Many of the mills are large enough to have their own coal-fired power plants, raising additional concerns about mercury, arsenic and radioactive emissions.

15 Little Known Facts About Pulp and Paper Industry:

Courtesy of "The State of the Paper Industry", a report published by the Environmental Paper Network.

Forests store 50% of the world's terrestrial carbon. (In other words, they are awfully important "carbon sinks" that hold onto pollution that would otherwise lead to global warming.)
Half the world's forests have already been cleared or burned, and 80% of what's left has been seriously degraded.
42% of the industrial wood harvest is used to make paper.
The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector's carbon emissions.
Paper accounts for 25% of landfill waste (and one third of municipal landfill waste).
Municipal landfills account for one third of human-related methane emissions (and methane is 23-times more potent a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide).
If the United States cut office paper use by just 10% it would prevent the emission of 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases -- the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road.
Compared to using virgin wood, paper made with 100% recycled content uses 44% less energy, produces 38% less greenhouse gas emissions, 41% less particulate emissions, 50% less wastewater, 49% less solid waste and -- of course -- 100% less wood.
In 2003, only 48.3% of office paper was recovered for recycling.
Recovered paper accounts for 37% of the U.S. pulp supply.
Printing and writing papers use the least amount of recycled content -- just 6%. Tissues use the most, at 45%, and newsprint is not far behind, at 32%.
Demand for recycled paper will exceed supply by 1.5 million tons of recycled pulp per year within 10 years.
While the paper industry invests in new recycled newsprint and paper packaging plants in the developing world, almost none of the new printing and writing paper mills use recycled content.
China, India and the rest of Asia are the fastest growing per-capita users of paper, but they still rank far behind Eastern Europe and Latin America (about 100 pounds per person per year), Australia (about 300 pounds per person per year) and Western Europe (more than 400 pounds per person per year).
The Forest Stewardship Council's certification of sustainable forestry practices is growing, with 50% of the paper product market share and 226 million acres accounted for. Advocates say the demand for recycled paper and sustainably harvested pulp from consumers, advertisers, magazine makers and other users of paper will yield the fastest reforms of the industry.

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iBride is Environmentally Friendly Wedding Planner!