Just a note: paper is either made of dead standing trees or wood that is so full of rot/defect that no lumber can be made from it. It is a common misconception that live green trees and whole forests are destroyed for paper.
- a former woodsman for 13 years
Edit: My experience is in western Canada. I forgot that hackernews is a global site. Some countries do grow pine specifically for paper.
Very much not true here in the USA. We have hundreds of thousands – probably millions – of acres set aside specifically for paper. It has been sustainable for well over 100 years and is super well planned, mostly by private companies.
Fresh water used for industrial processes generally makes its way to the oceans. We have essentially no way to deliberately replenish our ground water sources and the natural process is extremely slow.
> Fresh water used for industrial processes generally makes its way to the oceans. We have essentially no way to deliberately replenish our ground water sources and the natural process is extremely slow.
Then industrial processes shouldn't use groundwater. It doesn't sound like a good idea to site them where there isn't abundant surface water.
Paper mills might largely draw from rivers (I honestly don't know), but that doesn't fully alleviate the impact. Industrial processes pulling water impact downstream users, by reducing the amount of water (whatever percentage is not returned) and reducing the quality of the water that remains if they are dumping the used water back into the river.
But yes, if they use surface water, it considerably reduces the impact vs groundwater.
I'm not sure that is entirely correct. I live in San Jose, CA and we have groundwater recharge ponds. Throughout the city the water company has plots of land that they keep entirely covered with water. The idea is it soaks in, and then other people pump it back up.
That's interesting. I wasn't aware that there was significant recharge from human-managed/created basins. It looks like >50% of the recharge in Santa Clara county is non-natural. But it also looks like it still falls short of the demand from pumping.
I think the point is there is a specific rate at which that type of process is viable, and it is limited by available land and geography. As population grows, that becomes less doable.
Not to mention all the chemicals dumped in the air during production! I'm not sure if the stone paper will create less air pollution, but it bothers me when people think creating paper is an environmentally neutral process just because we have the first step of the process figured out.
But if you read the article, you will note that the "paper" is made from limestone and polyolefin, which is a plastic, which is also not good for the environment.
Just to add to this, I used to live near a paper mill, and had friends who worked there. More than half of their feedstock was sawdust and waste chips from the local sawmill, and about a quarter was recycled. Very little virgin wood was used, and what was used was not usable for anything else.
//
That being said, I wish this guy luck. Having different tech available for use in areas where it would be a better way to do things is not a bad idea.
I know someone who used to work for a paper forrester --the trees they plant are exclusively grown in managed timberlands for conversion to paper --no other use. They use fast growing varieties of trees[1]. The likes of Wayerhaeuser and others.
8-10 years. Most (~80%) of the power needed in a paper mill is generated from the bark of the tree which is converted into fuel using several chemical mixtures. Overall, the paper industry is actually very sustainable.
I'm more curious about the byproducts and energy consumption of each manufacturing process. I have no idea, does anyone have a good comparison?
Aside: supposedly global pulp production is 34 percent recycling, 45 percent from sawmill waste, and 21 percent 'logs and chips.'[0] The wikipedia article later states, from another source, that 16 percent of production comes from tree farms. The gist of your general point stands, as I understand it: we're not going out and cutting old growth or even secondary growth forests for paper (though we make use of reject trees when we target them for other reasons).
A large majority of the energy used in paper mills comes from the bark of the trees. Logs have to be debarked before they can be pulped and the bark eventually becomes fuel that supplies power to much of the mill.
I am a terrible writer but I have still considered it many times. I've seen a lot of incredible things being out in nature all the time. Also there are many misconceptions about logging that I like to clear up. But my stories are usually better at a party with a glass of wine!
I was working nightshift in an area with a lot of timber wolves. For three nights after sunset one wolf would sit just in the range of my lights and watch me. Dayshift would see the rest of the wolf packs tracks behind my machine each morning. Each night when I would drive home that single wolf would lead me out of the work site by walking ahead of my truck (The roads are rough, you have to drive slow). The most interesting thing that I noticed was: (besides how surprisingly large a timberwolf is) the wolf always walked in the shallowest snow. It is hard to explain why it was interesting, the wolf just seemed very aware and thought out in the way it moved.
I have also spent time with Lynx at a close proximity, both times they purred and acted like a house cat. Before hissing and slowly walking away.
I'm going to echo the chorus of praise from others, your writing is great and you should definitely consider blogging about your experiences.
I'd also like to point out how great it is that we have such varied commenters here on HN. I checked in tonight to see what's new with the NSA/Apple/Snapchat/usual tech stories of the day, and instead I got this gem about the timber industry and wolves.
Interesting stories can provide a useful framework for inspiration, setting goals, or looking at what "rule sets" are in play.
If it's intended to be a "simulate (a substantial part of) everything" game, the above stories suggest game elements such as different depths of snow, non-hostile wild animal interactions, animal pathing behavior in snow, tracks, and animal habits/routines.
Dwarf Fortress has for a long time used short stories to describe interesting interactions that the developers like, and then tried to add features to the game until similar events can just happen naturally.
Thanks for answering this to me. This is what I have in mind basically. I'm also working on something like Dwarf Fortress but a "lite" version which is more accessible.
I thought they mainly used fast-growing pine plantations planted specifically to harvest for paper.
(Which still isn't 100% ideal, because monocultured pine isn't friendly to the local species and they're generally devoid of animal life, but way better than clearcutting wild forest.)
It is possible that some where in the world people do that.
Lumber is worth far more money than paper, especially in our current economy. Growing trees for paper in a forest rich area like western Canada is more effort than it's worth and more expensive.
This is not true, most of the material for pulp comes from forest thinning, recycled paper and leftovers from sawmills, at least if you talking industrial scale.
>Official figures show more than half of Indonesia's rainforest, the third-largest swath in the world, has been felled in a few years and permission has been granted to convert up to 70% of what remains into palm or acacia plantations.
>Nine villages have been in conflict with the giant paper company April, which has permission to convert, with others, 450,000 hectares of deep peat forests on the Kampar Peninsula in central Sumatra. Because the area contains as much as 1.5bn tonnes of carbon, it has global importance in the fight against climate change.
From the article: "In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin."
200 kilograms of polyolefin, a class of compounds produced by polymerization of alkenes, which are derived from petrochemicals or ethanol, both of which come from water-intensive sources.
Also, is this stuff biodegradable at all? It's basically stone dust infused with an extremely stable plastic. This stuff would last a thousand years in a landfill...
On the other hand: how durable is it. If it can limit smudges and doesn't soak water or sweat easily, it could be an alternative where people would laminate otherwise. This is speculation of course, as I don't know what that stone paper is like.
This may or may not be a problem. Areas like Canada or Northern Europe have excessive amounts of water, and water preservation does not make sense. In some places domestic water usage is even encouraged to make sure the flow in fresh water tunnels stays brisk enough.
As far as I have understood it, this is mostly a result of overbuild infrastructure. They planned the capacity of some central pipes and sewers in a time where modern water saving technology wasn't yet used as much or even invented, because such projects are supposed to last a few decades. They build for growing usage and population based on the historic growth, but then water saving became a big thing, appliances became much more efficient, and people moved to other parts of the country and the bigger cities etc. So now that infrastructure is underutilized and flow is too low in some parts. But this is managed by the water companies, which know best where and when to increase flow. This is pretty localized, for example when they planned for a future housing development that never came, and just flushing twice won't put a dent in it anyways. Building a papermill in a suburb or countryside is also probably not the most efficient way to solve it.
There's no such thing as "excessive amounts of water." Just because current demand hasn't exhausted our current water supplies doesn't mean it's not worth conserving.
Here in Canada we have the Great Lakes which account for 21% of the worlds fresh water. And they're rapidly becoming polluted.
Humanity always finds a way to squander whatever resource you think we have "excessive amounts" of.
Can confirm from selling some wood from inheritance lands to pay the inheritance tax. Basically the good trees get sold for lumber and the ones not good enough become cellulose/paper (with the big machines you always do a full clearing as its more economical this way so you don't get to leave the small ones to grow etc.). This is from Finland.
And as others have pointed out most of the raw material going into the local paper mill was saw dust from the local sawmills.
This is not completely accurate either, you don't necessarily do full clearing even with the big machines. Typically there's couple of thinnings in the growth cycle from sapling stage to old forest, the whole cycle taking something like 70 years. Mostly you do full clearing at the end and then replant. This is my experience, also from Finland.
Yup, the shit wood gets put into pulp, the good stuff gets sawn out for lumber or veneer logs.
Hardwood pulp is just barely worth more than the stumpage fees that the loggers must pay to the landowners. Depending on the market, softwood pulp can be even less profitable.
It depends on the mill and the current economy. The wood chips will not be used for pulp but instead burned to generate power for the mill, made into fire pallets, particle board or other similar product. Based on what makes the most money in the current economy and the products the mill is equipped to make.
It's not true. It's based on one person's observation (in this case a Canadian woodsman).
Plantation trees are used to make paper in New Zealand and Australia. That is my personal observation, but it is enough to disprove the claim that paper is only made from dead or rotting trees.
> Plantation trees are used to make paper in New Zealand and Australia.
Same for Brazil and Uruguay - they go for certain kinds of eucalyptus trees. How do I know, not having visited either country?
My wife is a chemical process engineer, and Finland has a large pulp and paper industry. The technology universities feed process and design engineers there. (To a point where some universities' chemistry departments have been neatly coupled with local pulping industry.)
Eucalyptus family has some surprisingly fast-growing varieties. Also, according to the industry, their fibre competes in quality and properties with Scandinavian birchwood. This kind of fibre is particularly wanted for high-quality printing paper.
It takes 40-50 years for a birch to grow from seedling to a pulpable "product". With plantation eucalyptus, this time frame is compressed to 15-20 years. You can crunch the numbers.
The irony in this is that in in order to make space for eucalyptus plantations, the industry had to cut something down first. And due to the time frames involved, they need to constantly make space for new plantations so they can provide a reliable future supply.
The thing they cut down? Rain forest. (Among other things. But certainly enough of it to warrant concern.)
Final note: you can't grow eucalyptus in Scandinavia. According to Brazilian process engineers, eucalyptus can withstand one or two sub-zero temperature nights a year. Call it two max. Not two hundred.
Good observation. Another note about eucalyptus is that aside from paper or firewood, it doesn't have much use. It can't really be dried without extensive warping or splitting and doesn't have any use as lumber.
My dad worked at a paper mill in Australia, and all around were plantation pine forests. The plant was making all sorts of household paper goods - paper towels and toilet paper. I don't think it made actual writing paper though.
To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water, TBM says, while its Limex paper is made without water. In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin.
...
"Making paper from wood chips involves planting trees, which can be carbon neutral, so I’m not sure how much appeal this will have" from an environmental perspective.
Appeal from an environmental perspective: zero. Less than zero. Polyolefins are plastics. The vast majority are made from fossils. Polyolefins can be made starting from biomass but then so is ordinary paper. It's baffling if the inventor or his customers think that he's improved on the traditional environmental tradeoffs associated with paper production.
Polyolefins are some of the safest plastics around, environmentally speaking, and are fully recyclable. The paper may actually be as good or better than standard pulp paper is.
It may not be, too! Calculating the lifecycle is complex. But it isn't something than is easy to assume one way or the other.
They're starting off by replacing a potentially renewable resource (trees) with two nonrenewable resources (plastic and limestone). It could still come out ahead in the lifecycle analysis, but it's not a great place to start.
>and are fully recyclable
How about after mixing them with a bunch of limestone? Generally "hybrid" materials aren't recyclable (tetrapacks, mylar bags, wet strength cardboard, etc).
So I know limestone is technically a non-renewable resource, since we're using it far faster than it is being created.
Should, uh, we actually be worried? It's like 7% of the Earth's crust; are we actually using limestone fast enough to use up a significant fraction of the usable limestone in the expected lifetime of humanity?
It lists a variety of elements (like antimony) that are surprisingly constrained. If I were to pick the most critical material on the list, though, it would be phosphates. The green boom that feeds the world needs phosphates, the world supply of phosphate-bearing rock is small, and there are no possible substitutes.
This. They are not making paper out of stone, they are mixing limestone in plastic. No doubt there are some benefits to it (less plastic is used - though not 80% less because limestone has higher density), but marketing this as "paper" is highly misleading.
Plastics are commonly whitened with Titanium Dioxide and Zinc Oxide already. Calcium Carbonate is a pretty benign chemical as far as potential problems for the plastic waste stream go. I don't see any outstanding issue with its recyclability.
I did not say that polyolefins were dangerous. But they are less biodegradable and less renewable than the trees of which paper is normally made. And while polyolefins like empty distilled water jugs are easily recycled, I very much doubt that this blend of limestone and polyolefin can be recycled by the usual curbside collectors.
>But they are less biodegradable and less renewable than the trees of which paper is normally made.
This is not the safe bet many people think. If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones.
> If you look at the entire lifecycle of a product, plastic bags (to take an example) have a better footprint across the board than paper ones. //
Importantly we don't factor in destruction of the planet: use of non-renewable oil and pollution (and is impact on food supplies, etc.). This is where the cost seems higher with disposable plastic, a cost we are yet to pay.
The footprint calculation is our best effort to factor everything in, and that includes environmental degradation.
I don't want to minimize the difficulty of this- it's really, really hard to get right. But we do learn things, and (perhaps most importantly) we learn counter-intuitive things. And one of them is that plastics, even taking the tremendous problems with garbage patches in the ocean and the like, and not the clear-cut negative that our emotional side tends to think.
I guess the birds getting killed by plastic bags in the environment and the sea are happy to know that the life cycle energy consumption is better than paper.
That said I do not use paper bags or plastic bags but a recycled canvas bag I've used for hundreds of shopping trips.
Good to hear it. You're probably close to breaking even on the environmental cost it took to make that canvas bag.
//
The more energy it takes to make something, the greater the potential environmental impact.
Plastic in the ocean is awful. The vast majority of it comes from just a few countries. What some westerner uses to take home their groceries isn't even a rounding error in terms of source waste.
Reading the report says "Low-residual-value plastic waste is more likely to leak than high-value plastic [...] his means that products or packaging with low residual value (plastic shopping bags, for instance) are less likely to be collected; they therefore become a particularly significant contributor to ocean plastic"
Please also note that the biggest contributor, and the biggest reason for China being that contributor, is simple lack of a functional garbage collection system at all in large parts of the country.
I emphasize this because I think people tend to focus on the minutiae (ie, paper, plastic or canvas when it comes to grocery bags) when the bulk of the problem has nothing to do with bag choice, it has to due to a complete lack of wastestream infrastructure. It is understandable to a degree. The problem is so overwhelming, it feels like what one person can do is never going to be enough.
The only information I have regarding durable, intended-for-reuse grocery bags is for canvas, and the carbon break-even point is somewhere ~150 uses compared to getting one-off bags every time.
I would guess that heavy-duty plastic would fare significantly better, because cotton in general is an awful crop from an energy input standpoint, but I can't give you a more precise answer than that, I'm afraid.
If canvas bags are better after 150 uses, and in general are seen as wasteful to produce, I think that recycled plastic bags are fine. Thanks for the info.
Not to mention, limestone mining destroys the landscape just like any quarry does. Living on a 'limestone coast' I would hate to see that beautiful countryside pockmarked with any more limestone mines.
> limestone mining destroys the landscape just like any quarry does
In South East Asia, limestone quarrying and mining has destroyed the habitat of many species. There are dozens of species that are extinct, or are going extinct due to limestone mining. They clear entire limestone mountain ranges and turn them into cement.
All I can think is how this screws up existing recycle processes. In Denmark quite a lot of paper is recycled, but how does that work with this stone paper? If it cannot recycled together in a meaningful way, it's dead in the water.
What ever "semi-permanently" means. But I was thinking that both traditional paper and this stone paper will end in the same recycle bin, so that needs to be possible to seperate. If it can't, there is no reason to use this at all for general paper as it screws up the existing recycle process.
Pulping involves heavy use of chemicals and then treatment of the waste water. It's not obvious which process is more environmentally benign and along what dimensions.
The fact hemp is illegal is silly, but it isn't as amazing as all the potheads would have you believe.
Hemp is legal to grow elsewhere in the world, and importing it into the US has been legal since the 90s. Yet the worldwide demand for hemp has stayed flat, mostly because it requires a massive amount of water and humus rich soil compared to alternatives. The plant itself has a weak stalk that makes mechanical harvesting difficult, and can't be harvested year-round like trees can.
If it was a commercially viable alternative, you'd see usage in Europe and Asia. Remember that poor countries tend to gravitate to cost efficient materials for domestic use, yet almost all hemp produced is exported.
Buried in the article is that the binder is polyolefin, which basically just means plastic. So, this is plastic paper. Granted, the examples given were for semi durable items like menus and business cards, but i still see that as a net negative.
Polyolefins are used to make stuff like plastic bags and are heavily researched due to their substantial and very negative impact on the environment. So that this stone paper stuff is sold as a more environmentally friendly alternative to paper is just a big hoax. Our oceans are already littered with plastics and aquatic wildlife is heavily impacted. Plastics made out of olefin polymers can survive a whole century - i.e., this "water-free" tech might dump a century worth of plastic paper into our oceans. Nice! :-(
Depending on the type of restaurant menus can need frequent re-printing. I'm sure even at lower-end corporate chains there is a cycle time where new dishes are cycled through while older ones are removed.
I imagine in those types of restaurants, menus might be cycled-out due to wear and tear more often than due to changing dishes. In which case, the increased durability and water-resistance of this stone-based paper might result in less waste.
I've got a notebook of stone paper that I bought from a local office supplier which I use for general note taking. It's not the brand in the article however. Writing on stone paper feels quite amazing. The pen just glides over the paper, and the paper feels very high quality. It's waterproof and doesn't tear like normal paper (when you pull it apart it pulls like a flimsy elastic plastic that eventually rips). I thoroughly enjoy using it.
* the other ingredient is polyolefin resins - unless they are obtained from recycled plastic bags or similar, this probably makes Limex worse than normal paper (how much water is involved, we do't know for sure).
* what happens at the product's EOL? Will it end up together with recycled paper and cause problems in that process? Will it have to be recycled separately and if yes, who's going to be able to tell these types of paper apart?
> We're never going to run out of lime. Ever. It is literally everywhere.
Not true. Limestone suitable for mining is a limited resource. That's why cement companies like Lafarge pay millions for mining rights in South East Asia. They clear out entire mountain ranges to turn into cement.
They will mine wherever they can make the greatest profit.
That doesn't mean we will ever run out, or even ever run out of good-quality limestone. It just means that for a variety of reasons (mostly lax taxation laws and a population in poverty that will work for terrible wages) Vietnam is a hotspot for mining in SE Asia, but its total production is a rounding error compared to what is produced in China alone.
There is a lot to be discussed about exploiting poorer areas for resource extraction. It's a subject that goes beyond any one particular resource. But (in the case of lime) it also does not imply scarcity. Keep in mind that lime can be regenerated- the lime cycle is an endless loop.
It's an important point. There is nothing intrinsic about lime that requires carbon release beyond what is naturally released and consumed by the lime cycle itself, which is neutral.
Does the world's industry currently run on mostly hydrocarbons that do have a serious carbon footprint? Absolutely, yes. And it is something that needs to be changed. But that is a separate problem.
Paper is a declining consumer of wood. "Peak paper" was years ago, after print newspapers tanked. There are many abandoned paper mills, if you want one. It's possible to make paper from rice hulls (works fine, and common in China, but a bit hard as a writing surface), kenaf (works, but nobody bothers), and hemp (niche product for potheads).
Ecommerce will probably play an even bigger role there. The demand for paper packaging has been increasing constantly over the last decade. Amazon probably uses more paper than even a major newspaper.
From the article: "To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water". It hardly seems silly to avoid that cost, fresh water is on it's way to being a scarce resource in many parts of the planet.
It's not a scarce resource in the parts of the planet where the paper is produced, and it is not cost effective to transport water to these places in sufficient quantities for it to no longer count as 'scarce'.
I believe that number is purely the water used converting pulp into paper, not water consumed growing trees. I've heard it's 400 parts water and one part pulp, not sure how accurate that is.[1]
I am worried about the dust this type of paper might produce when it is shredded or ripped, similar to the dust from rockwool insulation materials made from stone fibres. If I remember correctly, the persistence time of rockwool dust (current generation not 1970s) in your lungs is about 4 weeks, during which it is /may be cancerogenic?
I had one of the most beautiful writing experiences with pencil on stone paper, it is amazing (Field Notes).
On the other hand, it is not for fountain pens. I think it is specialty paper that is very useful but will not replace regular paper and also should not be sold as ecological alternative.
Years ago, when I got the original Nexus One smartphone, I'm fairly certain the box it came in contained a small card with instructions on it that was made from limestone. I can't remember the name of the company responsible but I remember it being printed on the card and that I checked out their website since I was intrigued. I never saw those non-paper cards in any subsequent Nexus packages.
Edit: I wonder why Google stopped using them. Or maybe they didn't and I just never noticed since they were so paper-like.
I can imagine cutting trees, burning large areas of vegetation to allow for mining, which is even worse. Lands get deformed, parts of limestone mountains start collapsing. Plants never grow again in the area unless aggressive regenaration of the land and planting is done. The soil gets fragile and unstable.
I also wonder how the process of production is done. To process limestone usually produces a lot of co2 (I have no reference, but that's what I remember from reading stuff online). Additionally, as many have noted the plastics used (20% of the final mass of the product) still are plastics made from fossil resources. Is a way for recycling known, especially considering the final product is a mixture of plastics and limestone?
It seems that the producer does not have a real, scientific proof that his production is environmentally good, but does it as a 'novel', and 'fascinating' idea with the only goal of making money. The article itself says that the producer looks forward to making a product that will last, but does not indicate that the producer ever had a goal of protecting the environment.
Finally, the subject is very much worth of discussion in HN, and I personally feel thankful for the one who submitted it.
Trees aside, this is not a new concept, stone paper notebooks have been around for a while.
The ones I had wrote incredibly smooth and I loved every one of them. I think Walgreens still carries a small one.
Not surprising given that it is around one fifth plastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_paper: "The process for creating Stone Paper was first developed by Taiwan Lung Meng Tech Co. in Taiwan during the late 1990s. Stone Paper has been patented in over 40 countries, where its products are marketed under a variety of other trade names such as GPA UltraGreen, MIST Paper, Parax Paper, Terraskin, ViaStone, Kampier, Limex, CleanSlate, EmanaGreen and Rockstock, Pixz Printing, KYStone Paper and Nu Stone."
So, the main idea it isn't new either. What, if anything, is special about this startup's process?
Would this be considered a business, not a startup? I don't see major disruption happening in this space. Lots of companies make non-wood paper, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_paper and plastic.
There doesn't seem to be mention of few existing companies that have been producing notebooks and other products from limestone, for years now. One example:
So instead of carbon neutral pulp paper that can be recycled and biodegrades, this paper is 1/5 plastic, doesn't biodegrade, and probably ruins the batch if mixed with pulp-based paper for recycling.
The water savings are good, but this doesn't seem like a net gain.
Just an FYI that Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific papermills release tons of cancer-causing pollutants including PCBs, hydrogen sulfide, cyanide, formaldehyde, dioxin, acetaldehyde and chloroform into neighboring communities.
Yes. Polyolefins are highly flammable. They aren't the worst plastic to burn, but they will melt and stick to things, and you really shouldn't breathe the smoke.
Yes.
With the right attitude, anything is possible!
(really, don't, though.)
I have a notebook made from stone paper. I use it in my kitchen because water won't kill it and I can write on it in sharpie without it bleeding, even onto the opposite side of the page. This is not new.
"He says it’s the answer to concerns over deforestation and water shortages, with world demand for paper set to double by 2030."
I'm very curious as to what is expected to be driving this increase in demand. If anything, I would expect electronics to make paper more and more obsolete. But what am I missing?
Looking at some of the pictures supplied in the article, it looks like they're probably expecting packaging and food service consumption to go up, which you can't digitise.
Paper pulping factories are built where fresh water is abundant, they don't have a problem. These areas also tend to coincide with wood sources. It would be incredibly inefficient to make paper on desalination water when you can just ship it from a rainy place.
Whenever someone is making a big topic out of water consumption (not to be confused with water pollution!) without specific ties to an arid environment it's just a desperate attempt at greenwashing. Water scarcity is real, but it is not universally real everywhere.
If water is really that scarce there ( = expensive), they are most likely using a much more water-efficient process than the typical pulp factory close to arid wood resources. The rough ballpark numbers for "water use in paper production" include a majority of factories located in places where investment in water reuse facilities simply does not work out economically, and quite possibly not even ecologically.
why is there no effort to make artificial tree mass? this could be done by creating genetically engineered trees that use as little resources as possible to grow as much wood as possible in lab environments. one could even go as far as powering the cells electrically -- it is theoretically possible and has been done in the lab before. or, why is there no effort to synthesize wood itself chemically, industrially?
are you serious? like - really? because we already do solar powered, mass-industrial-scale, genetically engineered, hyper-optimized paper feedstock production in forests.
I don't think that's an unreasonable question. Your answer suggests that we already have the most optimal solution, which by analogy cows would be too. I assume you know cows aren't.
But like with cows, it is not inconceivable that "regular" trees are not the most effective way of making wood. They need to stay alive which means they "waste" energy doing so. While I personally don't think we can outdo trees with regular chemical compounds, I think we can at least genetically modify some already-optimized tree family in a way that require less water, sun, etc.
From a market perspective, there are really two distinct markets: temporary paper users (newspapers, mailers, the stuff you write your school papers on...) and archival paper users (eg libraries). For archival users, the biodegradability of paper is a bug, not a feature, even though for the bulk of overall paper users are probably the temporary users, and need to be able to compost or recycle your waste paper.
Imagine being able to drop your book in the bathtub and just shake it off; imagine future historians finding a thousand year old abandoned library in mint condition. A non-biodegradable paper wouldn't replace wood/rag pulp paper in any meaningful way, but it would have its uses.
There used to be a company called EarthShell which made biodegradable food packaging and other containers out of limestone and other stuff. It went public in 1998[0], filed for bankruptcy protection a decade ago[1], and their twitter account was last updated in 2010[2].
- a former woodsman for 13 years
Edit: My experience is in western Canada. I forgot that hackernews is a global site. Some countries do grow pine specifically for paper.