Are "is X good for environment" questions okay here?

Question

I'm not sure I completely understand what "sustainable" means and so what is on-topic for this SE site.

Suppose I want to know how eco-friendly some technology is. For example, my retailer offers "100% recycled super white paper" and I'm suspicious because I suppose that whitening recycled paper takes so much chemicals that the paper is not any greener than one produced from trees. So I'd like to ask how eco-friendly such paper is.

Can I ask such questions here?

Answer 1

Yes you can ask such questions here:

It is, as across all Stack Exchange sites, very much a matter of how you ask the question.

So it's important to get to the real nub of what you're trying to ask, in a way that fits with the site guidelines about subjectivity, answerability, and so on.

Let's take your example question. Why is it that you're interested? If you can answer that, then we can tighten up the question to something answerable in a small number of paragraphs.

• Are you interested in a comparison of the environmental impact of recycled paper versus virgin paper?
• Or is it the environmental impact of paper bleaching: in which case:
  • are you interested in whether there are different methods, and what the environmental pros and cons might be of each; or
  • are you interested in how you can identify paper with a lower-impact bleaching method?
• or something else?

So yes, I think you've got a good question there - it just needs a little bit of attention to get it into good shape. So thanks for asking here on meta, where we can work together to get to the nub of what you're asking.