FOREST WASTE AND FIRE LOSS 



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BY ARTHUR NEWTON PACK 



DID you ever stop to consider what a part the old ])e.riodical managers could not give us the reading mat- 

 family wastebasket plays in the depletion of our ter and stories that we like without those advertisements 

 forests? It may not be the 

 cause, but it certainly repre- 

 sents the end for between one 

 and two million trees every 

 year. Excej)! for library and 

 editorial files nearly every 

 copy of some twenty-five 

 hundred different daily i)apers 

 and fourteen thousand other 

 periodicals published in the 

 United States finds its w^ay 

 sooner or later to the waste- 

 basket. The amount is al- 

 most inconceivable. 



Our annual consumption of 

 two million tons of newsprint 

 a year means a strip of paper 

 as wide as the New York 

 Times and about forty mil- 

 lion miles long. Just as a 

 measure of distance, remem- 

 ber that the sun is ninety-two 

 million miles away. It would 

 also make a two-foot wide 

 ribbon of newspaper around 

 the world 1600 times. 



"I could get along without 

 half of my daily newspaper 

 anyhow," says the reader. 



"Look at those advertisements pages of them !" A large metropolitan daily weighs in the neighborhood 

 Very true ; but the trouble is that the newspaper and of four ounces: A Sunday paper may weigh a couple of 



pounds. Of course, part 

 of that weight is printer's 

 ink ; but we can probably 

 offset that against tne pa- 

 per lost through waste in 

 the printing, over-run of 

 co])ies, etc. Except on 

 Sunday you pay three cents 

 for your copy. At the 

 commercial rate of rve 

 cents a pound for the pa- 

 per alone, where do trie 

 editors, the reporters, the 

 printers and the owners 

 come in? Why, through 

 the advertising profits. 

 Any man who has ever 

 tried getting his adver- 

 tisement printed knows 

 what it costs. For a dou- 

 ble si)read in a single issue 

 of the Saturday Evening 

 Post, for instance, the ad- 



OUR ANNUAL CONSUMPTION OF NEWSPRINT IS EQUIVALENT TO A TWO-FOOT STRIP OF 

 PAPER FORTY MILLION MILES LONG 



EVERY DAY NEARLY FIVE THOUSAND GOOD-SIZED TREES FIND THEIR WAY BACK INTO 



OUR EVER-OPEN WASTEBASKETS 



