Returning students will be able to be a little kinder to the environment when they buy printer paper at the Cornell Campus Store this year. The store is no longer selling printer paper that isn't recycled and has also dropped its price for recycled paper made with post-consumer waste. Reams -- packets of 500 sheets of paper -- with 30 percent post-consumer waste start at $3.59, and a chlorine-free sheet called New Life containing 60 percent retails at $5.99. The non-recycled printer paper that the campus store carried last semester sold for $5.99 a ream.
The campus store is one of many Cornell enterprises under the umbrella of Cornell Business Services (CBS) that have become more environmentally conscious recently. Last February another CBS unit, the Cornell Distribution Center, decided to go green, and now 95 percent of the copy paper it sells is recycled and contains 30 percent or more post-consumer waste. And CBS itself has a web page on the joys of using recycled paper, including a useful glossary of terms: www.cbs.cornell.edu.
"It makes cents as well as sense to promote the use of this kind of paper," said Richard McDaniel, director of Cornell Business Services. "The quality is excellent, the price is competitive and the paper's use is environmentally responsible. I'm pleased we've been able to make the shift, and I think the students will welcome it."
He said that in a typical year the campus store sells 8,000 reams of printer paper, and the distribution center sells about 130,000 reams.
While any kind of recycled paper helps the environment, some kinds help more than others. Much of the paper for sale these days bearing the "recycled" label -- e.g., bathroom tissue, paper towels -- is made from scraps from paper manufacturers. The scraps would take up space in landfills if they were not recycled, but their use doesn't make a dent in the millions of pages of newspaper, magazines, catalogs and junk mail that consumers neatly tie up in bundles every week and place by their curbsides. Recycled paper that truly helps the environment contains a significant percentage of that kind of post-consumer paper waste.
Why choose recycled paper over the kind made directly from trees? According to members of the Cornell Greens, a student group that promotes environmental conservation, 95 percent of U.S. native forests have been logged by paper manufacturers. This loss of forest is endangering creatures great and small and unraveling the fabric of our native ecosystems. The environment is further damaged by the toxic chemical dioxin, which is a byproduct of the paper-bleaching process, and the process itself is an energy guzzler. Unbleached, recycled and tree-free papers, on the other hand, save trees, habitat, energy and landfill space, not to mention disposal costs.
Government major Josh Glasstetter '01, a member of the Cornell Greens, said, "We would like to commend Cornell Business Services for taking steps toward realizing the goals set forth in Cornell's statement on the environment," referring to a joint statement signed by President Hunter Rawlings and student groups in November 1997. "We will continue to encourage Cornell to be more environmentally friendly and hope that the increasing convergence of economic and environmental interests will speed this process along," he added.
The Campus Store and Cornell Distribution Center hope to sell more tree-free products in the future, including paper made from kenaf, an agricultural product with an advantageously short growing cycle, and paper made with reclaimed cotton.
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