Maybe It’s Time for Paper to Go to Pot : Environment: An Australian group notes that marijuana makes a better product and would save trees. But the government has reservations.

A group of Australian farmers and environmentalists want to make paper without cutting down trees. The problem is they want to replace wood with marijuana, a plant they say is superior to wood and more environmentally friendly.

Researchers agree, but marijuana’s narcotic properties have authorities in Australia’s island state of Tasmania worried.

“I’m sure we would become a very popular state if we started growing Indian hemp legally and on a large scale,” said Ian Colvin of the Tasmanian premier’s office.

The consortium, Hemp for Paper, submitted a proposal to Tasmania’s government in early February to plant 37,000 acres of marijuana and produce 100,000 tons a year of pulp for making paper.

“Hardwood is not needed for paper. Any fiber high enough in cellulose will do and hemp is one of the best,” said Patsy Harmsen, a spokeswoman for the 12-member consortium.

“It’s been used for paper for hundreds of years. Forestry companies are afraid of what this could do to them. It’s cheaper for them to cut down existing forests for next to nothing than to grow their own fiber,” she said.

Tasmanian development authorities are studying the proposal. The state is already home to the country’s only legal farms for the opium poppy, a plant grown for pharmaceutical uses in Tasmania but used elsewhere for the manufacture of heroin.

An Australian authority on non-wood fibers for making paper, Ian Wood of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, says a lot of the world’s paper and rope was made from hemp until about 1850.

Hardwood later became the staple for the industry when American pioneers, clearing forests in the United States, sought another use for all the timber they chopped down.

Today 93% of the world’s paper is made from wood and only 29% of it is recycled. About 7% of paper is made from bamboo, grasses, bagasse sugar residue, and even wheat stalks left after harvesting.

About 226 million tons of wood were pulped for paper in 1988, and at current rates of demand growth, this will triple by 2020.

Brigid Dowsett of the Australian Conservation Foundation says felling trees for paper causes serious environmental degradation and should not be allowed.

Hemp paper has a life span of hundreds of years, compared to only 25 to 80 years for the many grades of wood paper. It can be recycled seven times, compared to three times for wood paper, and does not need bleaching, which can damage the environment.

Harmsen, a psychologist and landowner, says hemp as a rotation crop would suppress weeds, improve soil, need no herbicides or pesticides and would not damage soil fertility.

Researcher Wood says that hemp, when grown in temperate climates like that of Tasmania, would yield low amounts of the alkaloid resin that gives the plant its narcotic qualities.

“You’d probably have to smoke 100 kilos (220 pounds) of it to get high, and you would probably just end up with a sore throat,” Wood said from Brisbane, where he studies alternatives to wood at the Commonwealth Research Organization’s division of tropical crops.

But grow hemp in a tropical climate, Wood says, and it becomes a potent narcotic.

One plant very similar to marijuana, known as kenaf, offers most of the same benefits for paper-making without the narcotic resin.

In a hot climate, the plant grows to a height of 16 to 20 feet in six to eight months. It can produce 12 tons per acre of dry stem material ready for processing, Wood says.

Only one pulp mill in the world has used kenaf as a primary raw material, the Phoenix Pulp & Paper Co. Ltd. in Thailand. It produced 70,000 tons a year of pulp from kenaf until 1985, supplying almost three-quarters of Thailand’s pulp needs.

However, it had to start mixing kenaf with bamboo and eucalyptus trees when it had difficulty getting farmers to grow enough kenaf.