You're right that it's about more than just carbon, and looking at it purely from a carbon footprint might be the wrong perspective. I was considering climate change to be the most urgent of our environmental issues and in terms of impact to climate change paper production is insignificant.
That being said, an individual reducing their consumption of paper based products is arguably the least impactful action we can take as a society.
Instead we should be focusing on the packaging industry's use of onetime use packaging for products, particularly those that are difficult or impossible to recycle (e.g. milk cartons, juice boxes, etc). This is not only a huge contributor to paper pollution but also micro-plastics pollution and landfill waste in general.
Greater Container-deposit legislation on more products (e.g. plastic bottles) and on limited use but highly recyclable paper goods (e.g. newspapers and magazines) would greatly increase the amount of recycling we do as well.
Comments
You're right that it's about more than just carbon, and looking at it purely from a carbon footprint might be the wrong perspective. I was considering climate change to be the most urgent of our environmental issues and in terms of impact to climate change paper production is insignificant.
That being said, an individual reducing their consumption of paper based products is arguably the least impactful action we can take as a society.
Instead we should be focusing on the packaging industry's use of onetime use packaging for products, particularly those that are difficult or impossible to recycle (e.g. milk cartons, juice boxes, etc). This is not only a huge contributor to paper pollution but also micro-plastics pollution and landfill waste in general.
Greater Container-deposit legislation on more products (e.g. plastic bottles) and on limited use but highly recyclable paper goods (e.g. newspapers and magazines) would greatly increase the amount of recycling we do as well.