The morning paper: good news and bad news.

• Position: LIFE-CYCLE STUDIES

Disposal

Roughly two-thirds of all newsprint is recycled; the other third is dumped. Several years ago, in the book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, Alan Durning and John Ryan noted that about two-thirds of American adults read a newspaper each day. Since then, newspaper reading has declined. The good news is that the daily paper's environmental impacts have declined. The bad news is that literacy and critical thinking, too, have declined. The disappearance of newspapers will be both cheered and mourned.

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Processing

About half of each log is sawed into lumber; the other half is chipped and trucked to a pulp mill. Additional chips are added from 300-year-old western red cedar and hemlock trees, to strengthen the paper so it won't sag into your coffee as you read. The chips are ground up, cooked, and bleached with chlorine compounds--releasing dioxins and other chemicals linked to cancer, suppression of the immune system, and reproductive disorders--into the rivers used for discharging mill waste.

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The virgin pulp is combined with deinked pulp from recycled newspapers and magazines to make new paper. When paper has been recycled three or four times, it is no longer useable and is dumped as sludge. In making paper, replacing virgin pulp with recycled reduces air pollution by 74 percent and water pollution by 35 percent.

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The ink is made from petroleum...