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Comment by dguo | Hacker News Reader

"He says it’s the answer to concerns over deforestation and water shortages, with world demand for paper set to double by 2030."

I'm very curious as to what is expected to be driving this increase in demand. If anything, I would expect electronics to make paper more and more obsolete. But what am I missing?

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Looking at some of the pictures supplied in the article, it looks like they're probably expecting packaging and food service consumption to go up, which you can't digitise.

If we build enough desalination plants, there'd be no such thing as [fresh] water shortage; 2/3rds of the planet is covered in it.

That said... Why aren't Paper pulping factories located near the sea, and have desalination on site if using fresh water is such a problem?

Paper pulping factories are built where fresh water is abundant, they don't have a problem. These areas also tend to coincide with wood sources. It would be incredibly inefficient to make paper on desalination water when you can just ship it from a rainy place.

Whenever someone is making a big topic out of water consumption (not to be confused with water pollution!) without specific ties to an arid environment it's just a desperate attempt at greenwashing. Water scarcity is real, but it is not universally real everywhere.

Agreed. But exceptions do exist. Singapore is neither arid nor self-sufficient in fresh water.

If water is really that scarce there ( = expensive), they are most likely using a much more water-efficient process than the typical pulp factory close to arid wood resources. The rough ballpark numbers for "water use in paper production" include a majority of factories located in places where investment in water reuse facilities simply does not work out economically, and quite possibly not even ecologically.

Desalination requires a lot of energy and is very costly.

Shipping boxes? <sarcasm> - I'm not really sure.

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