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Paper Facts

Paper is made by gathering the plant of choice, and beating it into a pulp. Water is then added, until the pulp becomes a slurry. The slurry is then sifted against a screen until it forms an even layer. Once it dries, a sheet of paper is formed.

The first paper was produced from rags in AD 105 by Ts'ai Luin, part of the Eastern Han Court of the Chinese Emperor Ho Ti.
Today, more than 95 percent of paper is made from wood cellulose.
In one year, 2 billion books, 359 million magazines, and 24 billion newspapers are published in the United States.

Every year, the U.S. and Canada chop down 34 million Christmas trees - enough to cover the state of Rhode Island with a forest.
Paper and paperboard constituted the largest portion of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream in 1994, representing 38.9% of the total waste by weight.
The United States and Canada are the world's largest producers of paper and paper products. The next largest are Finland, Japan, and Sweden, who produce significant amounts of wood pulp and newsprint.
The U.S. consumption of paper and paperboard in 1999 was approximately 354 kilograms (about 800 pounds) per person.

In 1997 the total world paper and paperboard production was 299,044 metric tons. It would take about 200,000 Volkswagen Beetle cars to equal this weight.
In the last 20 years, the combined usage of today's top ten paper users has increased from 92 million tons to 208 million, which is a growth of 126%. So the use of computers is not slowing the amount paper we use.
We use 12.5 million tonnes of paper and cardboard every year in the UK.
The average British family throws away 6 trees worth of paper in their household bin in a year.
Over a million tonnes of newspapers are thrown away every year in the UK.
On average every person in the UK gets through 38kg of newspapers a year.
The UK uses a forest the size of Wales every year in paper.
RECYCLED PAPER
All of your used newspapers, comics and magazines are collected from paper banks and your kerbside collection boxes and are transported to a recycling plant.
At the recycling plant, all inks, glues, staples, plastic film etc. are washed off the paper fibres and the wet mushy paper is called pulp.
Cleaned paper pulp is sent to a paper-making machine where the pulp is then injected between two wire meshes to form a damp paper sheet. This is dried to form the new recycled paper.
The dried paper is polished and rolls onto jumbo reels, each one about 30 tonnes in weight. The paper reels are then cut into smaller sizes to be sold.
The paper is then used for national and local newspapers throughout the UK and Europe. Newspapers and magazines will be back in your newsagents or through your door, within three to four weeks.

One ton of paper made from recycled pulp saves 17 trees.
100,000 tons of recycled materials are collected each year in the city of Phoenix (from 315,000 houses). 75% of this (ie: 75,000 tons) is paper and paper products including card, junk mail, magazines, cartons and newspapers
Recycling paper uses 60% less energy than manufacturing paper from virgin timber.

Until the end of the 19th century, the process of papermaking involved extraordinary searches for rags to make paper. This fact must have been on the mind of this anonymous 18th-century English poet who penned the following verse:

RAGS make paper
PAPER makes money
MONEY makes banks
BANKS make loans
LOANS make beggars
BEGGARS make RAGS