How my industry is killing your environment.

I stumbled into this article while browsing Slate.com today ... low and behold, the employment that is my bread and butter is also one of the worst offenders of my heart's passion.

Here's the link, please read and then I'll feel free to ramble.

It was this quote that made my heart jump into my stomach:

" ... overall, the Department of Energy estimates that the paper manufacturing industry is the nation's fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, trailing only the chemical, petroleum and coal, and primary metals industries."

Oh GOD. What have we done? What are we continuing to do? Does the fact that I'm a journalist whose work is continually printed in a weekly and monthly format also make me a hypocrite?

So, I asked. My editor wasn't sure on our recycled content, so I asked our distribution manager.

We use the same printing source as the Concord Monitor. The Monitor gathers paper stock from various companies at any given time to supply their very large need for tabloid sized newsprint. Because the sources change so often, so does their recycled content. Our paper [The Hippo, not OXX Cycle] is printed on anywhere from 10 to 99% recycled content.

The bad thing about recycled newsprint is, the higher the recycled content, the worse ink does on it. Plus, you can't keep recycled paper sitting around in some warehouse awaiting its final destination. The sooner you can use that paper, the better- otherwise it starts to break down.

Regardless of this development, I wanted to run the equation used in the Slate article to apply to the Hippo. My numbers are rough, so just work with me on this one.

The Hippo is a tabloid, not a broadsheet newspaper. As a result, we use less paper than, say, the Union Leader based solely on page size alone. We're about half the size of that, so based on broadsheet terms, we have to cut the equation in half.

The Hippo has an average of 56 pages per issue. That means 28 full tabloid pages. We have a distribution of 200,000 readers. So, once a week, we print 5,600,000 tabloid pages. Times that by 52 weeks in a year and we print on a total of 291,200,000 tabloid pages a year.

Wow.

Okay, so, if one ton of newsprint is equal to 280,000 broadsheet pages, than that's equal to 560,000 tabloid pages (roughly). One ton of newsprint requires the content of 12 mature trees. Take our 291,200,000, divide that by 560,000, and you have 520 tons of newsprint used by us every year. That's equal to 6,240 trees per year to supply our paper- the second most read news publication in New Hampshire. This is not including the recycled content of our pages, nor does it take into account the two other publications we produce. If, on average, we use 50% recycled materials, that drops our tree usage to 3,120 trees per year. Better, but still not good.

You can see why my brow furrows at all of this. We recycle our returns and we use recycled sources, but is that really enough of an effort? Shouldn't we invest in our website a bit more? Sure, that takes electricity to run, but we can always get that from a renewable source [I'll-be-it in the distant future at the rate we catch up].

So, yeah ... that's the the deal for now. More coming soon!

Be green, hug trees!
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