Using plants that grow quicker and use less water seems like a better business decision to me.
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Most logging, and certainly softwood logging, is in places where there’s going to be a forest anyway regardless of whether you’re harvesting trees from sections of it every twenty years or so.
They’re not out there with sprinklers… the water being used is water that’s naturally in the local ecosystem would be used by trees, and cycled back into the environment through transpiration, regardless of any logging activity.
The trees are also not normally cut down just for paper. A lot of the wood that gets turned into paper is byproduct and “waste” from the rest of the timber products that the logged trees are destined for.
Bamboo is starting to make it’s way into more and more paper products now. It’s quite easy to find bamboo toilet paper, paper towels, nappies and wipes etc in stores, certainly here in the UK and Europe. [The Cheeky Panda](https://cheekypanda.com/) is one of the biggest sellers here.
Somewhat/mainly however you wanna see it because of these 2 monsters to society
William Randolph Hearst and
Harry Anslinger
Both were owners and profiteers of the tree paper industry and would lose their pockets if hemp became the norm back then.
As for modern day times it’s the same issue, there’s too many people that stand to lose too much if we switched to the hemp or bamboo alternative.
Slowly but surely we will make the switch.
> Using plants that grow quicker and use less water seems like a better business decision
Water for forestry comes from the air, nothing else. Rain and humidity is important.
Grow quicker only matters if you can use the result for anything valuabel. Softwood is used for lumber, which gives a better return. The rest is used for paper/board, but the money is in lumber. You can’t use hemp for lumber.
And then there is land use. Hemp is an agricultural plant, it grows on farm land. Trees grow (also) where you cannot farm, due to the terrain/soil/distance.
Wood fibre is stronger. NBSK pulp mills ship pulp to China where they will mix it (repulp) with bamboo pulp.
I read somewhere that because the paper industry is heavily lobbied in the US government, and became the industry standard thanks to the old elite being heavily invested in the paper industry. For example why marijuana/hemp was outlawed in the US. It challenged the paper industry. The rest of the world just followed suit. I’m not 100% sure so don’t quote me.
> why wouldn’t the companies spend their money toward absorbing hemp into their line of products,
Funny thing about hemp. It’s “pretty good” for several different products, but it’s not the **best** at any of them; in other words, for anything that hemp -can- do, there’s something else that can do it better and cheaper.
The economics just don’t come together for a lot of those use cases.
Hemp also destroys the ground soil. You can only grow about 3-4 generations before the soil is junk. Look it up.
Loggers are not growing trees in irrigated fields. They are planting mountain and hill sides that are naturally watered enough to grow trees and would be forested regardless of humans planting trees or not. If the kind of tree they are using takes 10 years to mature they have 10 areas they are planting and harvest/replant one each year so that there is a constant rotation for them to obtain wood from at a fairly stable rate over the years.
There once was a newspaper magnate named William Randolph Hearst. He owned a paper making company, too to give to his newspaper company. One day, people started using hemp as a way to replace paper, she his business was getting hurt. He published many made up stories in his newspaper about an evil-sounding drug being brought in by “dirty Mexicans and blacks” called “marijuana.” Everyone was afraid that these people were dating their white daughters, so he got hemp made illegal. Now we all have to use paper, even though the founding fathers grew hemp. *The more you know 🌈 and sound play here.*
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