Saturday, February 15, 2014

A question's been bugging me for the last few days: How many trees do we use to make Bibles every year?

A quick Google shows there are about 100 million Bibles sold every year, with a quarter of that coming from the US. Using that information and the data from this site as well as this forestry guide, I estimate at least one square mile of trees (about 192,000 individual trees) is used each year to print the world's Bibles - and that's being very conservative with my estimates; the actual number could easily be 5-10 times that if no recycled content is used and if the trees are spaced farther apart.

Hooray for nerdery!