Ever wonder how much paper is used to print all the books we consume every year? 

Every year, Americans consume  more than 90 million short tons of paper and paperboard. That’s an average of 700 pounds of paper products per individual each year. Each  year in America, 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 staggering number, but doesn’t mean much to me, so lets put it in perspective.

An average tree can be made into around 1500 pounds of paper, which will  create 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 conservative in our estimates.

So for 2 billion books, it takes about 2 million trees to be processed  . But of that large number, it seems 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 every day by the forest community. Of course this doesn’t take into account the untold millions more trees that regrow from seeds and sprout naturally.

In order to satisify  all the world’s need, Oregon alone creates  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 actually may be under harvesting in certain areas. So all in all there is no immediate need to stop buying discount books online. But if we can drop our demand on paper products as a nation , then maybe we will be able  to export our own products to other nations and recreate our failing industry base.