clipped from: www.alternet.org   
North America consumes 50 million trees a year for paper cups. Buy a travel mug already!

We have some amazing technology developing here in Canada. Homegrown high-tech whiz-bang -- Nobel Prize material, really.

This system is too good to be true: it can provide fuel, or be easily processed into one of our most versatile building materials; it can sequester CO2 to slow global warming; be harvested for food; increase ecosystem health and biodiversity by providing habitat for animals, birds, plants and insects; slow damaging storm-water runoff; purify water; and help remediate contaminated soils. The feedstock is free and abundant, and maintenance on the system is negligible.

Or, we can destroy trees for pulp to make paper coffee cups, which, after 15 minutes of use, we throw in the garbage can. Then, we pick the cups up with pollution-belching trucks and throw them in a dump, where they rot and create more greenhouse gases.