“Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.”
Thomas Edison

First, full disclosure: I, too, just like you, am a paper consumer. Among other things I buy, keep, and stack on shelves and in boxes as many or more books, magazines, newspapers and catalogues made of paper as any other American. More, my writing appears in some of these paper products and (I hope) contributes to their raison d’être and that you read them. When colds or allergies strike I go through tissue paper with abandon, though I remember as a boy carrying a handkerchief and blowing my nose into it until even a young boy’s sensitivities were offended and it was washed and reused. For reasons of convenience that practice has been abandoned.
Like most Americans I consume a certain share of paper cups, plates, envelopes, cardboard containers, calendars, notebooks, paper towels and toilet paper. Like most Americans, each week I receive in the mail in the form of catalogues, promotions, advertisements and the like far more bulk paper that I discard (recycle if possible) than mail that is actually part of my life. That paper and all the energy and labor and pollution and, most importantly, trees that contributed to its production are completely wasted. William Monson said, “Waste is not grandeur.”
America is the most wasteful phenomenon in earth’s history, and we are all complicit in its abundant poverty of spirit and care for the earth’s paper thin environment.
The average American uses 300 kilograms (660 lbs) of paper a year. In India it is 4 kilos. The U.N. estimates that 30 to 40 kilos will meet basic literacy and communication needs for each person on earth. Paper was first invented (by Ts’ai Lun in China nearly 2000 years ago from rags, discarded fishing nets, hemp and grass—no trees) as a communication tool. The Gutenberg Bible, the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution and Mark Twain’s original works were all printed on hemp based paper without a single fiber of a single tree. While there is about as much chance of America restoring its once thriving hemp industry to make paper as there is of its current government abiding by the tenets of its Constitution or respecting its mandated separation of powers, to do so would benefit the social, democratic, cultural, psychological and biological environment of the world.
About 40% of the municipal solid waste of the world is paper. More than 90% of paper comes from trees. A fifth of the world’s timber harvest is for producing paper, and while the paper industry refers to trees as a “renewable resource” that is disingenuous at best. There are such things as “tree farms” where trees are grown somewhat the same way chickens and hogs are grown as product, not living organism, but they are destructive to the environment, not an integral part of it. A tree farm is not a forest. Trees from both forest and farm supply about 55 percent of the paper of the world. Thirty-eight percent comes from re-cycled paper, and 7 percent is from non-tree sources. Three tons of trees are required to produce one ton of paper, and the pulp and paper industry, the fifth largest industrial energy consumer, uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. About 12,000 square miles of forest are consumed each year by U.S. pulp mills.
Recycled paper production creates 74 percent less air pollution and 38 percent less water pollution than paper created from “virgin fiber.” There are different levels and standards of recycled paper. That is, some recycled paper product is more recycled than others. In our world, which is the only world we have or ever will have, the environment on which all life depends is as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is being torn apart by the excesses of man. One factoid illustrates a larger reality: The group Environmental Defense estimates that if the entire U.S. catalog industry switched its publications to just 10-percent recycled content paper, the savings in wood alone would be enough to stretch a 1.8-meter-high fence across the United States seven times. With a few enlightened exceptions—Patagonia is the leader in this endeavor (check here https://www.patagonia.com/on/demandware.static/Sites-patagonia-us-Site/Library-Sites-PatagoniaShared/en_US/PDF-US/Paper_Procurement_Policy_EN_051116.pdf) ¬¬¬¬—they will not do so unless their customers (consumers) demand it.
Who in their right mind would want to stretch a 1.8 meter high fence across the United States seven times, or a 30 foot high wall across the border with Mexico once? But paying for either of these absurdities by catalogue companies switching to using recycled paper makes far more sense than shutting down the government for a paper thin emergency by a President who is the antithesis of paper thin except in his claim to ability.