Carolyn Moran owns Living Tree Paper Company in Eugene, Oregon and markets tree free paper products. For seven years Carolyn published Talking Leaves, a global journal of spiritual ecology and activism. Published on tree free paper, the magazine has subscribers from more than 25 countries.

About four years ago I found out you didn't have to use trees for paper -- it was new to me! When I figured that one out, I said, 'Wait a minute -- we're fighting for the forests-someone's got to do it.

I was fortunate to get a grant from the Rex Foundation, so I switched my magazine to hemp straw paper that was out of China. It was really bad paper, I didn't know the difference. Badly made, it jammed the presses and had web breaks. But I didn't want to give up.

Fortunately, a sheet of really nice paper that was 70% hemp and 30% cotton came across my desk. It was out of Eastern Europe. So, I wound up traveling all over Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, talking to hemp farmers and papermakers. I also went to the East Coast [of the U.S.], to paper mills, talking to people in the paper business.

We started out with a 10% hemp, 10% esparto grass, 60% agricultural by-products and the rest was post-consumer waste. It was super high quality -- but it was also very expensive. Manufacturing costs were really high.

Now we've come out with a paper that is more competitive in price in a niche market -- alternative fiber papers -- that has 25% hemp, 25% recycled cotton rag (which means that it's recycled) post-consumer non-wood fiber, and 50% processed post-consumer wood fiber. It's called Vanguard Hemp(TM). Our hemp comes from France and Spain, so we ship over dry hemp pulp. The rest of it comes domestically. Our hemp content is elemental chlorine-free.

The pulp mill I'm working with right now is converting to a closed loop system, which means that all the elements stay within the system and at that point the hemp pulp will be totally chlorine-free. We're aiming to get the paper into all the copy shops and large stationery stores. We're in Real Goods' catalogue.

I prefer hemp, because it's political for me, too. It's a movement, it's getting people to look at the issues. The big U.S. paper manufacturers would get into hemp now if it were legal. They'll first get into hemp and flax for building materials, like pressboard, because they're very viable fibers.

The trouble with industry is, it's [focused on the] short-term. If they would look at the long-term profits -- water use, pesticide use, everything -- they might be able to see that yes, it's profitable today. They tend to want to have it just immediately and they have an industrial mind set -- it's always worked this way. They're not looking at the fact that things have changed environmentally.

Awareness of the use of hemp for paper and fiberboard in this country is growing everywhere. I get calls from all over the place and people are opening hemp businesses all over the country. Internationally, it's been an industry -- in China, France, Spain, now the UK. Germany really set the stage for it in Europe. In Europe, there are government subsidies for growing agricultural crops, so right now the people in Europe who are making the money are the farmers, because they're subsidized, and so are the seed people.

It's specialty paper still, and will remain so for quite a while, another five years, maybe. I'm a hopeful kind of person. So, I'm working with industry. I'm working with a woman who is very conservative. She's getting behind the hemp issue with me -- as a real economic development issue for Oregon; or displaced timber workers.

We have to work with all types of people. The polarity -- that we have between supposed conservatives and forest activists allows corporations to keep us polarized. When you sit down with women, even timber women in their rural communities, they have the same issue: they don't want the trees cut down, they don't want their water polluted, they're willing to try things, to try more sustainable practices. But they just haven't been educated, they've only been educated by industry. The consumer has got to be willing to put a little extra money down and we have to force industry to not be using our forests for pulp and paper.

Copyright (c) 1997-98 OLIFE -- Oregonians for Labor Intensive Forest Economics. All rights reserved.