Thread by @ainvvy

This is an interesting question. How much wood does a newspaper consume?

So I weighted a few hindus ... paper that is. And found it weights about 75-90 grams on a typical day and ~130 grams on Sunday. Rounding off, this amounts to about 40 kg a year.

https://twitter.com/TVMohandasPai/status/1135084001645871105

A tonne of newsprint uses 12 trees. So 40kg is about half a tree.

If you subscribe to two papers you are probably cutting off a whole tree (of course, other papers may have slightly different number of papers and hence weight).

The Hindu has a daily circulation of 1.4 million. And I counted about 35 million in the top 20 circulating papers.

So the Hindu is looking at 700,000 trees.

Now assuming 1000 trees per hectare, we get 700 hectares or 7 square kilometres of area!!

Ok, some portions of paper is recycled. I don't have the numbers, but maybe 30%; in which case it is still 5 sq km on The Hindu.

The number for all newspapers in India should be much
much larger. I have seen figures up to 100 million copies a day. If this is true, it can be as large as 350 sq km of area.

Paper sizes are different and number of pages are different across newspapers ... since we are estimating, maybe 200 sq km is not a bad number to think about.

To put things in perspective, Chennai is about 400 sq km. We are looking at half of it (or thereabouts) of trees every year.

As I have already said, recycling etc will bring this number down. But even to recycle, they were cut at some point.

Coming back to the Hindu, 7 lakh trees is a lot of trees. Bangalore has 14 lakh trees. That is like 2 years :)

Should we be reading papers at all? I wonder ...

Let me end here. If you have better numbers on any of the parameters, do redo the calculations and tweet them.