Don’t worry: it’s in a good way!

I’m astounded.

And from the sound of it, even people at Grays Harbor Paper are surprised by the numbers in the recent carbon assessment from Carbon Solutions Northwest.

Let’s start with some points of reference. These were all taken from the EDF’s PaperCalculator, BTW:

• Virgin paper produces an average of 5826 lbs. of CO2/ton of paper
• 30% recycled content is around 5160 lbs. of CO2/ton
• 100% recycled content is around 3605 lbs. of CO2/ton

These numbers cover all sorts of things including the use of gas fired dryers, paper decomposition, processing, pulping, etc. Surprisingly, they never seem to drop THAT much in the “nearing zero” sense that we would all love to see. This can be attributed to the energy intensive processes used in the manufacture of all paper. Don’t think that virgin paper has this close of a margin on recycled content though! This is just CO2 equiv…. recycled content automatically means less raw material which is good any way you look at it.

Now comes the Harbor 100 number: 650 lbs. of CO2/ton of paper

Yeah… crazy! There’s a noticeable drop THERE and this is attributed to the unique methods of directing tackling energy hungry processes like electricity and heat generation differently.

Ughhh… sounding PR-y. (You don’t know how much I hate press releases… sorry David!) Seriously though; biomass which is wood waste in most processes was the key to making such a low impact product: producing carbon neutral electrical energy and steam/heat on site automatically fills in the most energy intensive and carbon laden processes. The margin is so huge… I don’t even know what to say so I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

Note: So, this is just icing on the cake: Carbon Solutions also has a figure before the carbon neutral electrical energy is taken into account. This number would better represent the CO2 output when just the manufacturing process is considered: 1545 lbs. of CO2/ton.

Impressive.

Link: The real press release pdf