Natural Perspectives:

Vic and I continue to spend a lot of time in San Diego, helping out with the twins while Scott and Nicole tend to our newest grandbaby. With three granddaughters in disposable diapers, the trash sure accumulates fast.

I couldn’t help but compare modern times with when my two boys were in diapers back in the 1960s.

Back then, I used cloth diapers, as did my mother and grandmothers. We dunked them in the toilet, swished them around, and then laundered them for reuse, hanging them on the line to dry. We used washcloths to clean babies’ bottoms instead of disposable wipes.

I must confess I prefer the convenience of today’s modern disposables. But the conveniences enjoyed by our modern society have resulted in environmental problems.

I’ve always lived with indoor plumbing and had toilet paper, as did my mother.

However, my father and generations before him used an outhouse, with pages from the Sears catalog or Farmer’s Almanac as wipes. Colonial Americans used corn cobs and leaves.

The first packaged toilet paper wasn’t produced in the U.S. until 1857. It came in large sheets and was very expensive. The Scott Paper Company produced the first toilet paper rolls in 1890, but my father’s family and many others couldn’t afford it.

My grandmothers used cloth hankies, but I used Kleenex to blow my nose. Kleenex came into common usage in the 1920s. By the time I was born, the disposable era was well underway.

Vic still uses a cloth handkerchief for the occasional sniffle, but a cold sends him for the Kleenex box. Let’s face it, disposable facial tissues are far more sanitary and convenient than cloth handkerchiefs.

The way paper is used has changed enormously during the past 200 years. In the early 1800s, paper was a precious commodity not to be wasted.

It was made mainly from linen fibers and was very expensive. The use of wood pulp to make writing paper didn’t become common until the mid 1800s.

My great-great-grandfather Thomas used a sandbox in the front of the schoolroom in Wheeling, W. Va., to practice writing and ciphering back in the early 1800s.

The schoolmaster would smooth out the sand and the students would use a stick to write in it.

My maternal grandmother, Ada Thomas, his granddaughter, used a slate at school in West Terre Haute, Ind., in the 1890s. She carried this letter-sized piece of flat stone edged with wood to school each day and wrote on it with chalk.

Computers were supposed to usher in the paperless era, but it seems to have done just the opposite. Paper piles up in our offices faster than ever before.

At least Vic and I buy computer paper with recycled content. We also use Seventh Generation paper towels and toilet paper because they, too, are made with recycled paper.

Almost all of the paper we use so freely in our modern society comes from wood pulp. Huge stretches of tropical rain forest are cleared in the Amazon each year to grow forests of eucalyptus trees.

Those trees are then felled and shredded into wood pulp to make our facial tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, computer paper, magazines, newspapers, greeting cards and junk mail.

But the Amazon isn’t the main source of wood pulp. In 2006, the global production of wood pulp was 175 million tons, with much of it coming from the forests of Canada and the U.S. A number of different types of trees are used to make wood pulp. Paper is made from softwoods such as spruce, pine and fir, as well as from hardwoods such as eucalyptus, aspen and birch.

A major concern is clear-cutting of old-growth forests to make wood pulp. About 10% of paper pulp is produced from old-growth forests that took hundreds of years to reach maturity.

Use of these magnificent trees to make toilet paper is a travesty. A small amount of pulp comes from agricultural sources or other non-wood sources. The rest, or about 90%, comes from tree plantations.

Some of these forests are sustainable, with trees replanted to replace those cut down. However, one of the major concerns with paper production is that forests with high biodiversity are replaced with monocultures of one type of tree.

If those trees are foreign to that environment, such as eucalyptus in the Amazon, then the area becomes relatively useless to wildlife.

Paper production requires the use of large amounts of water. The shredded wood is treated chemically to separate the two main components, cellulose and lignin. Cellulose fibers are used to make paper products. Lignin is waste. Unless the water is reclaimed, large amounts of lignin go into nearby rivers or lakes as a major pollutant.

So do other pollutants, much worse ones. In 1996, 14 million pounds of toxic waste that included dioxin and PCBs were released into the waterways of Wisconsin, the largest paper manufacturing state in the U.S. Although there have been minor improvements in recent years in reduction of toxic wastes, the volume of paper production has grown enough to offset those improvements.

Paper manufacture also requires large amounts of electricity, which in turn contributes to global warming by pumping yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Paper mills themselves are significant sources of air pollution, contributing to global warming, acid rain and respiratory problems.

Americans use 700 pounds of paper products per person annually, a total of one-third of the world’s paper production. Half of the paper made in the U.S. now comes from recycled fibers and wood waste such as chips and sawdust, but we could be doing much better. Paper fibers can be recycled 5 to 7 times before they become too small to make more paper.

As consumers, you can help conserve habitat and reduce pollution by buying recycled paper products and recycling paper and cardboard.

It’s really easy to put various types of clean paper and cardboard into the blue recycle bins for pickup by Rainbow Disposal.

When it comes to paper products, reducing and recycling can make a big environmental difference.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.