Making paper without trees.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Alternate sources for paper manufacture - Includes related article

Paper has not always been made out of wood. The ancient Egyptians made paper out of papyrus plants; the 3rd-century Chinese made it of flax and wisteria; the 8th-century Japanese made it of hemp; and the 12th-century Spanish made it of cotton. A 17th-century English preacher named Gcorge Fox, who practiced nonviolent resistance to tyranny three centuries before Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, wrote an account of his travels that was printed on a fine linen paper made of recycled rags. ("If they Strike thee on one cheek turn the other . . . fighters are not of Chrift's kingdom," reads one passage of the 800-page tome.) A surviving copy of the third edition, printed in 1765, sits on a shelf in the home of a World Watch writer. The original leather binding has dried up and turned to dust. The 228-year-old treeless paper, remarkably, is almost like new.

Good paper is still made from non-wood sources in many places: from rice and barley straw in China, from sugar cane waste ("bagasse") in Mexico and India, from bamboo in Vietnam, and from the kenaf plant in Australia. But since the early 20th century, the vast bulk of the world's paper has been produced from wood. An estimated 4 billion trees are cut for paper each year.' and while papermaking is not a primary cause of deforestation, the rapidly rising demand for wood pulp for paper mills puts increasing pressure on those forests that remain. The tree plantations that produce most pulp now stand where natural forests were cut-whether in Florida, Indonesia, or Thailand. With the world's paper demand expected to double by the year 2010, the need to expand tree plantations could also nearly double.

According to a report by Australian paper executive Andrew Kaldor in the October, 1992 TAPPI Journal of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry, about 13 million hectares of wooded land are required to meet current world pulp requirements, based on an estimate that 70 percent of all pulp is made of virgin fiber. As recycling increases, the virgin portion is expected to drop to 55 percent by 2010. But even with that relief, the projected increase in paper demand will expand the requirement for wooded land by then to about 23 million hectares.

Because of the long lead times required for harvesting, meeting that demand would require planting about 10 million hectares of land each year from now on, according to the report - and that is not happening. The crux of the problem, then, is that the world will face a growing shortage of fiber around the turn of the century, and this will inevitably drive up wood prices. The result mill be "accelerated pressure for the exploitation of existing mature forest resources," says Kaldor-unless manufacturers can find more efficient means of using land to produce their raw materials.

Non-wood sources may offer such means. Kenaf, for example, is a fast-growing plant that produces two to four times more pulp, per hectare, than southern pine. Kenaf pulp has all of the technical characteristics needed for most grades of paper, according to studies by the U.S., Chinese, and Japanese governments, among others...