Several states have banned single use plastic and plastic carry-bags in India. The change is obvious in these places. Plastic use is now very less and people have started using paper, clothes and jute bags instead of plastic carry bags. But this good development has potential to create a new problem - increase in paper consumption would mean more trees being cut for increased paper production!
Domestic paper consumption has been increasing in India. As this article from CARE Ratings published on 12th Feb, 2018 tells, the domestic demand in India grew from 9.3 million tonnes in FY08 to 15.3 million tonnes in FY16 at a CAGR of 6.4%. But this plastic bag ban is a game changer - this would definitely lead to increase in per capita paper consumption; which may be good for paper industry in India but not for the environment.
According to references, 1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses 0.6 trees (Ref). According to this Quora thread, "each ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees and a multitude of other resources such as oil, water, landfill space and the energy used to produce paper. The average person in the United States uses approximately seven trees per year in various paper products, totaling 2,000,000,000 trees per year."
Another report from the USA tells, "The United States produced about 20,700,000 tons of this paper last year, which by my reckoning (see below) takes 55 to 110 million trees, but we only recycle about 11,000,000 tons, or 53 percent, according to those who should know: the American Forest and Paper Association."
The solution to this threat is to re-use paper to the extent possible before throwing, and to recycle more paper than we are doing now.
If we re-use and recycle more then this will reduce the harmful effect of increased paper consumption due to plastic-ban.
- Rahul Tiwary
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