Does recycling help reduce deforestation??

Question

Just saw a commercial touting that show "Axmen" and wondered. Does recycling help save our forests. Also, the show touts these so called axmen as heroes I do not see it that way. First, there is nothing heroic about chopping down trees, trees don't run or fight back. Second, the guys on the commercials keep stating how they are like the pioneers,again wrong.

Answer 1

No.  Logging companies that supply paper mills plant trees to replace the ones cut down.  In North America the amount of forest cover has been steadily increasing since the early 20th century.

Answer 2

Recycling in great for reducing deforestation.   A good logging company will plant new trees to replace the ones cut down, or grow trees in stages on a tree farm.  Unfortunately this is not always the case.  This is why it is important to reuse old furniture and use substainable sources such as bamboo.  There are also a lot of eco friendly furniture out there also that can be found on Yahoo Green. . .And when it comes to paper the only way to fix that is to opt out for unsolicited mail, recycle any paper you may receive, and to only buy recycled paper materials.  You can even request the different catalogs and mailers you get, to start using recycled paper, because that is one of your concerns as their client and as a consumer.

Great question!!!

Answer 3

Recycling helps the environment because we don't need to cut down as many trees to make paper.  Also, we don't have to use up as much land for landfills.

Answer 4

Yes, thousands of pounds of paper is recycled daily, and each tree makes much less than that...thus it saves trees.

Answer 5

Yes, it will.

It is true that logging companies replant trees to replace the ones they take down, but the replacement is sparse and takes a long time to recover completely.

Last month, I went to Oregon to visit a friend of mine for a few days.  Logging is HUGE there; there are dozens of enormous logging trucks on the road.  My friend's house is in the foothills outside of Eugene and had been completely surrounded by forest until just recently.

In the summer of last year, the logging companies came up through the woods behind his house.  The hillside was devastated; nearly impossible to traverse by foot or any other means.  Debris everywhere.

This work took one day to complete.  No heroic axemen, but with one man running one logging machine, they cleared out about 50 acres.  (Of course, the logging companies still want to blame unemployment on endangered owls, but this is a moot point.)

I went up on the hillside to survey the wreckage.  There were Douglas Fir saplings planted here and there, but nowhere near as dense as the untouched woods nearby.  It's probably going to take about 40 years for these trees to grow to the size of their predecessors, and longer than that for the forest to return completely.  In that time, many many more acres of trees will be taken down.

So yes, recycle!  It does help.