Green Impact
Environmental Impact, 48 trees or 1,500 pounds of shredded paper:
WomanCraft recycles 100% used, shredded office paper to make our handcrafted items. Additionally, we conserve by beating our own remnant paper into a pulp and using it to form new sheets. We also store the pulp left over from sheet formation in a refrigerator and rehydrate it to form new sheets.
Paper accounts for 40% of the solid waste thrown away in the United States each year; office paper makes up ¼ of that 40%. This is a staggering figure, but there is some progress to report. The paper recovery rate reached an all time high of 56% in 2007 in the U.S. and paper recovery now averages about 360 pounds/year for every person in the United States, according to the American Forest and Paper Association website (afandpa.org)
There is still opportunity for inprovement. In 2001, in the U.S., we each consumed an average of 700 pounds of paper every year--nearly 7 times more than the worldwide average (according to www.tappi.org). According to the the Garner Group and HP, the average daily web user prints 28 pages each day. Every year, Americans throw away enough office and writing paper to build a wall 12-feet high, stretching from Los Angeles to New York City (source: Browning-Ferris Industries).
It is impossible to create a completely accurate equation to determine how many trees are conserved when a group or company recycles used paper or chooses to buy recycled paper products, since the trees that went in to each sheet would have varied widely in weight, density, and age, and some of the wood may have already been chipped or shredded as a byproduct of other industries.
However it is valuable to make some estimates as to our impact, in the hope that we can encourage all consumers to both become as informed as possible about the significant environmental consequences of using virgin paper, and to learn about major corporations working to lessen this impact on the environment & grassroots organizations struggling to reverse it.
Conservatree.com has a lot of great information and links to help you learn more. From this site we've borrowed a useful generalized calculation: 1 carton (10 reams) of virgin office paper = approximately 0.6 of the average felled tree. Based on these numbers we've worked out the following for WomanCraft:
1 WomanCraft Hollander beater (the machine that turns our shredded paper to pulp, ours is bigger than most) holds approximately 5 reams of shredded office paper (determined by weight of bagged shreds vs. weight of standard reams), so:
1 WomanCraft beaters-worth = approximately 1/3 of a tree
We estimate that we make about 3 beaters-worth of pulp each week, 48-50 weeks a year. Using the conservative number, we run our beater 144 times a year, so we create recycled paper equivalent to about 48 trees a year, and keep about 1500 pounds of paper from going to an incinerator or landfill!
Botanic Elements
Our botanic elements are donated from floral retailers when they are past their “sell-by” date. We collect these expired floral bouquets and plants from two area groceries, a Trader Joe’s and a Jewel. We also accept dried flowers from individuals. We dry the flowers and leaves and keep them by type and color to decorate our handmade paper items. Another way we recycle botanic elements is our “Bring Us Your Bouquet” service offering through which WomanCraft will put flowers from a special event into custom handmade paper to make memory books, thank you notes, or other custom items. We estimate that we divert about 52 30-gallon bags of botanic elements a year from the landfill, for a total of 160 gallons in volume.
We're proud of our small contribution to recycling, but we also know that our numbers don't mean that 48 trees that otherwise would have been cut get to remain standing. The biggest impact we can make is helping people be informed. There is progress in responsible environmental stewardship by both paper manufacturers and consumers, but we can do more. In 2006, WomanCraft was honored in recognition of our leadership in environmentally responsible products and services by receiving Mayor Daley's GreenWorks award. In June, WomanCraft will receive the Illinois Recycling Association's 2009 award for "Best Use of Recycled Material!"
Please find out all you can, reduce, reuse, and recycle whenever possible, and support your community's recycling programs. For a useful guide to help you recycle more, try this site.
Thank you!
