My last post on questioning conventional wisdom on recycled paper generated some terrific comments. After all, when you look more deeply into some of these issues, they aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Is possible that post-consumer waste (PCW) paper isn’t as green as we think it is? The question was worth asking.
One of the people commenting on the post made this interesting observation: “Post-consumer wastes do consume more energy to recycle than mill-broke or pre-consumer, but if the energy required to reacquire it all is less than producing new paper from trees, then I believe it is still a worthy quest.”
That is a question worth asking, and it generates yet another question. How does the energy to create PCW paper compare to that used to create paper from virgin paper? I did some digging and tried to find out. Here are some of the stats I uncovered: (more…)