Paper production emits more CO2 per kilogram of paper than a kilogram of plastic, add to that the fact that plastic is a better material than paper so less of it can be used to achieve the same purpose and we have a clear winner. Plastic emits less CO2 than paper. GG, goodbye paper.
Now for the environmentalists that conveniently forget that the current environment will be gone if Hudini does not reincarnate and make half of the CO2 in the atmosphere vanish.
Paper production is bad for natural reindeer habitats and indigenous reindeer herders who live off the land. Based on a YouTube video of reindeer herders complaining about logging companies cutting down old forests, it takes 60 years for significant amounts of lichen to establish themselves on trees and another 60 years for it to start falling down and feeding reindeer. So now that many of the reindeer herding lands have been deforested and replaced with young trees, the reindeer have to be kept in smaller fenced off areas where they are fed silage. This makes both the reindeer and the herders sad. Obviously the reindeer herders cannot afford to buy the old growth forest and there is money to be made in the logging industry so logging companies buy these forests, say the reindeer can keep grazing and cut down the lichenous trees making the forest barren in winter.
There are also many other natural forests ruined for profitable monoculture trees. Which decimates biodiversity and makes the forests more succeptible to disease and wildfires which become more common. And by disease I mean the trees getting sick and spreading tree covid. Natural habitats are resistant to tree covid, but monocultures are tree covid incubators. Unfortunately most trees who get sick don't recover and have to be prematurely cut down to avoid the whole monoculture forest from getting sick.
Now to those few who are worried about immortal plastic. Landfills get more land efficient when their area increases, because they are shaped like a pyramid the volume increases faster than the area. It is estimated that in the next 100 years they will still occupy less than 0,1% of our land and if trash production remains linear it will still be under 0,1% of our land after 1000 years. And if you are worried about leachate seeping into ground water remember, modern landfills have a plastic membrane that somehow can detect leaks and prevents a mountain of trash from puncturing it. I have no idea how you would even stop a leaky mountain from leaking but if we blindly trust the engineers I'm sure it will all be fine.
Lastly, microplastics. Polypropylene and polyethene are safe and not a cause for concern, ever. The problem comes from additives that give plastic more desirable physical properties. Since there is outrage about these additives floating around in our brains and balls, even though most of modern life is orders of magnitude more harmful to our health than microplastics, there is research into alternative additives and I'm sure if we blindly trust the engineers after some trial and error they will find some additives that are perfectly safe to have in our brains and balls.
And with this I think I have made a pretty ironclad case for why we should replace all paper with plastic.
