Final Project: The Toxic Tree

I took numbers relating to recycling and paper making and arranged them in a logical manner. I then printed in on transparency so that I wouldn't use paper.

Here is the essay:

One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year. Making paper from waste paper produces 73% less air pollutants and uses 61% less process water than when paper is made from virgin fiber. The production of a ton of paper requires 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and more energy per ton than glass or steel. Making a 1 ton of virgin paper requires 3,688 lbs. of wood. To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down. If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year! Every ton of paper recycled saves more than 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space. Paper products make up the largest part (approximately 40 percent) of our trash. Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year. 86 percent (approximately 254,000,000) of Americans have access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling programs. The average per capita paper use in the USA in 2001 was 700 pounds. The average American uses 7 trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year. A paper mill uses 40 percent less energy to make paper from recycled paper than it does to make paper from fresh lumber. Every year more than 900,000,000 trees are cut down to provide raw materials for American paper and pulp mills. 17 trees are used to create each 2000 pounds of paper. The 17 trees saved can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide. If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. If Americans recycled every phone book each year, an estimated 650,000 tons of paper could be saved. Packaging as the single largest category of paper use at 41% of all paper used. 115,000,000,000 sheets of paper are used annually for personal computers. The average daily web user prints 28 pages daily. Americans throw away enough office and writing paper annually to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from Los Angeles to New York City. It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times. It is estimated that 95% of business information is still stored on paper. Each day American businesses generate enough paper to circle the globe at least 40 times! About 35% of municipal solid waste (before recycling) by weight is paper and paper products. Americans waste about 580 pounds per person each year. Mount Rumpke is the highest point in Ohio at over 1000 feet is no Mount Everest; however, it is made up entirely of garbage. Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute! Recycling half the world's paper would free 20,000,000 acres of forest land. Resources saved Per Ton of Paper Recycled: 380 gallons of oil and 60,000 gals of water. Approximately 1,000,000,000 trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S. Paper is the number 1 material that we throw away.