• How we use wood in the United States: 44% lumber, 9% sheets of wood, 18% fuel, 29% paper.
  
• How we use paper in the United States: 44% paper board (cereal boxes and other cardboard), 30% printing and writing (office paper, computer paper, magazines, etc...), 14% newsprint, 7% tissue (tissues and toilet tissue), 5% packaging.
  
• It takes more than a billion trees to make the 85 million tons of paper Americans use every year.
  
• Reducing junk mail can save at least 100 lbs.
  
• Reusing grocery bags can save about 50 lbs.
  
• Recycling one ton of paper can help the Earth by saving: thousands of gallons of water, thousands of kilowatts of energy, 3 cubic yards of landfill space.
  
• By recycling all of our newspapers, we save over 500,000 trees each week. The average family can save between 100 and 200 lbs.
  
• Old growth forest trees such as redwoods grow taller than the Statue of Liberty, weigh as much as 800 school buses and live to be 3500 years old. They are logged or cut down to make decks, homes, and fences. It takes 3,000 years for a giant redwood to grow to 20-30 stories high. It takes two hours to cut one down.
  

1. How many grocery bags does a 15-year old tree make?
2. How many new trees are used for the Sunday papers in the U.S.?
3. How many less trees does it take to make a ton of virgin paper? Water? Energy? Air pollution?
4. How much carbon dioxide does a single tree absorb in a day?
5. How many trees are being lost in tropical forests each hour of every day?
   
   

1. About 700 bags per tree. Grocery shoppers alone use billions of bags.
2. About 500,000 new trees are used for the Sunday paper in the U.S.
3. It takes 17 fewer trees, 7,000 gallons less water, 4,102 kwh less energy, and 60 pounds less air pollution to make a ton of recycled paper, as opposed to virgin paper.
4. A single tree absorbs about 26 pounds of carbon dioxide.
5. About 500,000 trees are cut hourly worldwide, 75 acres every minute, 108,000 acres each day, 39,000,000 acres a year.

Tip: Try Tree-Free Paper!

• Kenaf is a tropical plant from Asia whose woody stem produces a fiber similar to tree fiber.
  
  
• Hemp is another tropical plant with tough fibers in its stalk. It has been used for many years to make rope, cloth, and paper.
• Old clothing and rags were once the main source of fiber used to make paper. But in the late 1800s mass publishing created a great demand for paper--and a shortage of rags--so paper makers started more trees.
  
  Today, some paper makers are again creating paper from rags and recycled blue jeans!