Paper facts

Paper facts


What are the environmental and social concerns about paper production?
What is the link between the paper industry and climate change?
And why should we use less paper?

Find some answers in this section to get you started on this complex issue.
For more detailed reports and analyses visit our Tools & Resources section.

  • Making a tonne of paper from wood requires 98 tonnes of other resources. (1)
  • Making a tonne of paper uses as much energy as making a tonne of steel. (2)
  • Deforestation causes more climate change emissions than global transport. (3)
  • In industrial countries, the paper industry is the biggest user of water. (4)
  • 45% of all print-outs and photocopies are binned before the end of the day. (5)
  • Industrialized nations, with 20 percent of the world’s population, consume 87 percent of the world’s printing and writing papers. (6)
  • North Americans and Europeans use more than 200kg of paper each per year, while the average African uses just 6.5kg. (7)
  • Of the global wood harvest for “industrial uses” (everything but fuelwood) 42% goes to paper production. (8)
  • Global production in the pulp, paper and publishing sector is expected to increase by 77% from 1995 to 2020. (9)
  • Total global consumption of paper is still rising and has reached 371 million tonnes in 2009. However, total paper consumption in North America and Europe has been declining since 2006 while it is steeply rising in China. China has become the single-largest consumer of paper products in 2009. (10)
  • The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of water used in industrial activities in OECD countries and is the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, after the chemical and steel industries (11)
  • Tree plantations host about 90 percent fewer species than the forests that preceded them. (12)

(1) Hawken, Paul & Hunter, Amory L. “Natural Capitalism.” Little Brown & Co., September 1999. Liedtke C., Material Intensity of Paper and Board Production in Western Europe. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, August 1993.

(2) Making 1 tonne of paper and steel requires 8,000-11,000kWH. USA Environmental Protection Agency.

(3) Forestry causes 17.4% of global climate change emissions, transport causes 13.1%. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Assessment Report 2007, Synthesis Report, page 5: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.

(4) Taevs, Debra. “Recycling’s Pushed ‘Reduce, Reuse’ Out of Equation.” Portland Metro Sustainable Industries Journal, June 2005. OECD Environmental Outlook, cited on http://www.environmentalpaper.org/PAPER-statistics.html

(5) 1 trillion pages are binned on the day they are printed, according to Xerox, reported in Guardian Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2007/oct/14/workandcareers.news

(6) Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme, Keynote Address UNEP’s 7th International High Level Seminar on Cleaner Production, 29-30 April 2002.

(7) World Resources Institute Earthtrends data: http://earthtrends.wri.org

(8) Abromovitz and Mattoon, Worldwatch Paper: Paper Cuts, p. 20, 1999.

(9) OECD Environmental Outlook. Paris: OECD, 2001, p.215.

(10) Environmental Paper Network: The State of the Paper Industry Report 2011, p. 4. http://www.environmentalpaper.org/state-of-the-paper-industry-2011.php

(11) OECD Environmental Outlook, p. 218.

(12) Allen Hershkowitz, Bronx Ecology, p. 75, 2002.