Find out how much cellulose is made by all the plants in the biosphere and compare it with how much of paper is manufactured by man and hence what is the consumption of plant material by man annually. What a loss of vegetation!
Find out how much cellulose is made by all the plants in the biosphere and compare it with how much of paper is manufactured by man and hence what is the consumption of plant material by man annually. What a loss of vegetation!
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Annual global cellulose production by plants is approximately 2 × 10¹¹ metric tons, making cellulose the most abundant organic polymer on Earth
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Annual world paper and paperboard manufacture totals about 4 × 10⁸ metric tons (over 400 million tons)
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Human use of plant-derived cellulose for paper thus consumes roughly 0.4 billion tons per year
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This consumption represents only about 0.2 percent of the cellulose produced annually by plants (0.4 billion t ÷ 200 billion t ≈ 0.002)
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Despite seeming small proportionally, 400 million tons of plant biomass diverted to paper each year signifies a substantial withdrawal of vegetation resources for a single industry
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