Recycling paper is bad for the environment. Really!

There is a lot of hype today about recycling and saving the environment and reducing global warming and things like that. As is often the case with hype, reality and facts get distorted. Sometimes, it’s useful to step back to examine some of the claims in more detail.

Many people believe recycling paper is good for the environment. The logic, according to its proponents, is that recycling paper means we don’t have to cut trees to make new paper.

Trees are arguably the best known way of carbon sequestration. That means, they can very efficiently capture and store as wood the CO2 that your car just dumped into the atmosphere. As a bonus, they use photosynthesis, which is free energy. Trees are essentially solar-panels that capture CO2 back from the atmosphere.

But here’s the problem: Once a tree has grown to its full height, it reaches an equilibrium where it can’t capture and store more CO2. If we cut this tree down and plant a new one in its place, the new sapling can capture more CO2 from the atmosphere.

That, of course, leaves us with the problem of what to do with the tree that we just cut. We can make paper out of it, but the problem re-presents itself as: “What do we do with the paper once we’re done reading it?”. We can bury it in landfills, but that’s kinda expensive, and land is not abundant, what with 75% of our planet under water already.

What is the best thing you could do with it? Burn it as fuel, of course! Release all the stored CO2 back into the atmosphere for the new sapling that you just planted.

Now we’ve come full circle, but here’s the interesting thing. We got energy by burning the paper, but this whole process doesn’t cause global warming. The CO2 gets recycled back into stored wood in the new sapling, which, when it has grown, we burn to get electricity and release the CO2 back and the process repeats. This is just a clever way of using solar energy to generate electricity.

Recycling paper, on the other hand, requires energy to be supplied to the recycling factories. We usually obtain this energy by burning coal or natural gas, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. But now there is no tree to capture all the emitted CO2 back, which, of course, results in Global Warming.

Recycling paper actually causes more CO2 to be emitted! Stop recycling paper!

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