Would you like to know  how much paper is used to publish all the books we consume every year? 

Americans consume  more than 90 million short tons of paper and paperboard annually.  That’s an average of 700 pounds of paper products per person each year. Each  year in the United States , more than 2 billion books, 350 million magazines, and 24 billion newspapers are printed  according to the Technical Association for the Worldwide Pulp, Paper and Converting Industry

That’s a large  number, but doesn’t mean much to me, so lets put it in perspective.

A normal  tree can be made into around 1500 pounds of paper, enough to make  about 1000 hardback books according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Although the new rage is discount paperback books, we’ll go with this number to be cautious in our estimates.

So for 2 billion books, it takes about 2 million trees to be processed  . But of that large number, it appears  that a large  portion of the market is being filled by post consumer product. 44 percent (or about 45 million tons per year) of all paper in the United States is recovered for recycling each year according to the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.

Let’s add another layer to our knowledge base; over 2 ½ billion trees are implanted in the U.S. each year. The forest community plants over 1 ½ billion of these trees; that’s an average of 4 million new trees planted each  day by the forest community. And  this doesn’t take into account the untold millions more trees that regrow from seeds and sprout naturally.

In order to satiate all the world’s need, Oregon alone produces 6.5 million Christmas trees and harvestes 4 billion board feet of timber annually, enough wood fiber to produce 4 million tons of paper products and build 267,000 homes. Although Oregon forest growth exceeds timber harvest and now has more timber than it did in 1952, conflicting federal laws and logging prohibitions have stalled harvest. Oregon harvest this low is unprecedented since the depression-era 1930′s. Between 1940 and 1990, Oregon harvest averaged 7 to 9 billion board feet bi-annually.

Are we as a nation running out of timber? Not hardly, and it looks like we truly may be under harvesting in certain areas. So all facts considered  there is no immediate need to stop purchasing  discount books online. But if we can drop our demand on paper products as a people  , then we can once again begin to export our own products to other nations and recreate our failing industry base.