All the kenaf that’s fit to print

We don't need trees to make paper.

Carol Greenhouse | May 2008 issue

We don’t need trees to make paper. After all, wood wasn’t always the material of choice for magazines and Post-It notes. Many items have been used, like animal skins. But the paper industry, which makes 187 billion pounds of the stuff yearly for the U.S. market alone, is now dependent on the mighty tree.

That could change. A cadre of visionaries has plugged kenaf since the 1960s, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture picked the species of hibiscus as the worthiest of 500 tree-free alternatives. Firms from Warner Brothers to Kinko’s have since used it in catalogues and copy machines; environmentalist David Brower printed his 2000 book Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run on it; and the U.S. firm Vision Paper has sold it to 2,500 clients since 1992. But milling is erratic and expensive, and ordinary paper is so available that kenaf hasn’t captured the collective imagination. Vision Paper no longer stocks it, though founder Tom Rymsza hopes to again.

The potential is easy to see. The crop grows in five months—15 years for a Southern pine—and makes more paper than the same land planted in trees. Environmental benefits are big too; no chlorine bleach is needed, for example (read: No dioxins are released). Some say if mills were built or revamped, kenaf could replace paper at no extra cost. So the race is on. Says Rymsza, “Fifty years from now, we want people to read the history books and say, ‘We once cut down our forests to make toilet paper?!’”

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