I was asked the other day how many trees it takes to make a piece of paper. Obviously the real question is the other way around and is how many pieces of paper you can make from a tree. The thing is that really you need to know how big the trees are going to be.

Anyway, quite often you'll hear that 17 trees makes a ton* of paper.

But that's not really the answer because paper hardly ever is made this way, paper usually comes from lots of trees which are very small because if they were bigger when they were cut down then they would be used for making buildings and tables etc.

But a very rough number is that a 2 ton oak tree will produce you between 1,000-2,000 pounds of paper which as a sheet of paper. A4 paper weighs about 5g per page (if it's 80gsm). Therefore you get between 90.7 and 181.4 pieces of A4 from each 2 ton oak tree.

You don't make paper that way, but it is an answer the particular question.

* That's an American ton, 1 us ton = 0.984 uk tons.