The Origami Forum

I started to think about it but I don't know. In general terms I consider myself a person interested in the ecology, but at the same time I think about all the paper I've used for folding during this time, and that's just being an amateur!

So I start to think about all those campaigns promoting the reduction of paper use as a preventive method against the indiscriminate cutting of trees. I would say, in the present, origami ISN'T considered an anti-ecological practice, but I ask myself about a future where humanity's consumption of paper surpasses the growth of forests, becoming a real emergency. Can such a future arrive? If so, what will happen with arts like origami?

I was a little reflexive today, and since I didn't find an answer, I decided to share my thoughts with you .

i dont really think origamists use enough paper to clear out the world of trees and plants. especially when they grow back.

well i've just stopped folding with paper for a while and started folding with train tickets

If you waste paper (folding horrible, and not learning from the mistakes to improve on the next folds), it does not matter how much, is waste and this is anti-ecoligical. If you use paper wisely I don't think so.

I actually thought of origami and environment as well. I think that origami probably hardly impacts the environment at all. There are just very few people all over the world who even knows what it is let alone practice it. The paper consumption by origamist is simply negligible compared to, say, any other uses you can find for paper like printing.

If you're ever worried that you use too much paper or affect the environment with your folds, you can always recycle your drafts or reuse copy paper that you find in your recycle bin. And if you think that paper is going to become a rarity, then I guess you can... start making supplies?

By the way, is tissue foil even recyclable at all? And what about double tissue + MC=?

you can usually completely smooth out tissue foil but it takes a long time. yes double tissue is recyclable! just put it on your piece of glass and paint it with mc again.

Thank you for your replies. Waste from origami would be very low when compared with waste from a lot of different sources, but I'm not sure that means it isn't important (in ecological terms).

Right now I'm asking myself about the future of origami and the other manual arts. There's currently a generalized interest in ecology, but you're basically free to decide doing something about it or not. I wonder if in the future there could be a great ecological emergency, who knows when, that will entail a lot more pressure over what people can and can't do. Is something like that too impossible?

So I ask myself about arts like origami in a future like that one. In a world with a lot of pressure over what's ecological and what's anti-ecological, would origami be ok? Could ecological disasters eventually even affect the arts?

Folding paper and worried about the environment? Get some perspective. In the UK, one power station alone consumes 35,000 tonnes of coal a day and emits 20 million tonnes of CO2 a year. Google "Drax". I personally won't worry about all my practice paper ending in the bin.

I agree, origami paper use is negligible in comparison to other activities. Think about it this way, in the average day you probably use much more toilet paper than origami paper...

Driving your car less, reprogramming your Heater/AC, and becoming vegetarian would be *much* more effective than giving up origami. And given how news about climate change has just gotten worse and worse over the past 5 years, it's really important that everyone starts to make these lifestyle changes before it's too late.

>>> you probably use much more toilet paper than origami paper...

Wait a sec.... Are you suggesting another way to re-cycle mangled origami models ?

- Hank Simon

Ran across this comment in a few different forms when shopping for specialty paper online:

http://handmade-paper.us/page/CPO/CTGY/lok

The LOKTA paper popularly known as rice paper; is handmade traditionally from time immemorial in Nepal from the bark of Daphne Papyracea called LOKTA. These plants are found in the forest of Nepal between the altitudes of 6500ft to 9500ft. Nepali has 110,000 metric ton of green lokta raw material available. The total production capacity till now is apx 15,000 mt. Nepalese farmers allow sufficient time for the plants to grow and develop.Lokta production does not affect the fragile forest ecology of Nepal.

Now I'm not saying Lokta is the best thing out there or anything, just that some paper is made specifically with renewability in mind. You don't necessarily have to kill, cut down and grind up forests to make paper.

Paper does not have to come from cutting down trees, cotton makes a great sheet of paper.

I do not think it can, as someone said, you can always fold already used paper (printed paper), I normally testfold using old homework, I am almost sure that I have around 23 kilos of school work waiting to be folded, so basically origami is ecological cause you can recycle paper that would be just thrown away otherwise.

If by any means origami became an ecological threat, I bet there would be like a complete origami underworld hiding from the goverment and folding in secret

Seeing how many advertisings I get every day that go unread directly into the recycle bin, the amount of paper I use for folding seems negligible. And then at work all raw data we produce needs to be printed and kept for ten years by law, there are countries where it is thirty years and one country just thinks about keeping this data 80 years. I wonder where all of this paper is stored. There have to be huge depots filled with paper that lies there waiting to be shredded when time goes by. What an immense waste of resources. And then I look at my beloved paper collection. Paper that waits to be folded into small works of art that maybe will bring a smile to a human face. Can that really be a waste? Do I need to have a bad conscience because of my hobby? I don't think so.

Great answers. I've learned a lot of things I didn't know.

Iwvi wrote:If by any means origami became an ecological threat, I bet there would be like a complete origami underworld hiding from the goverment and folding in secret

Iwvi, thanks for answering my specific question, that was what Ireally had in my mind. And you're right, it would make a lot of sense. It sounds a little like fiction for now, but I really don't completly discard that possible (maybe distant) future.