Cornell students will be able to be a little kinder to the environment when they buy printer paper at the Cornell Campus Store this year. The store now sells only recycled printer paper, and it can be bought for as little as $3.59 for 500 sheets, much less than the non-recycled printer paper the store carried last year for $5.99 a ream.

The store is one of many Cornell enterprises under the umbrella of Cornell Business Services (CBS) that have become more environmentally conscious lately. Last February another CBS unit, the Cornell Distribution Center, decided to go green, and now 95 percent of the 130,000 reams of paper it sells yearly is recycled and contains 30 percent post-consumer waste or more. CBS's web site even has a recycled paper glossary: .

"It makes cents as well as sense to promote the use of this kind of paper," said Richard McDaniel, director of CBS. "The quality is excellent, the price is competitive and the paper's use is environmentally responsible." Typically the store sells 8,000 reams of printer paper a year.

Some kinds of recycled paper help the environment more than others. Much of the paper for sale these days bearing the "recycled" label is made from scraps from paper manufacturers. Their use doesn't make a dent in the millions of pages of newspaper, magazines, catalogs and junk mail that consumers place by their curbsides weekly. Recycled paper that helps the environment contains 30 percent or more post-consumer paper waste.

Why choose recycled paper over the kind made directly from trees? According to members of the Cornell Greens, a student group that promotes environmental conservation, 95 percent of U.S. native forests have been logged by paper manufacturers. This loss of forest is endangering creatures great and small and unraveling the fabric of our native ecosystems. The environment is further damaged by the toxic chemical dioxin, which is a byproduct of the paper-bleaching process, and the process itself is an energy guzzler. But unbleached, recycled and tree-free papers save trees, habitat, energy and landfill space, not to mention disposal costs.