How Many Trees Were Killed for Representative Dingell?

The only really intesting piece of information that came out of yesterday's House Subcommittee Hearing (Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: Marketing, Education, or Deception?) is how many documents Pfizer and Schering-Plough have supplied separately to Representative Dingell's panel to date. James Sage, senior director of Pfizer's Lipitor team, unequivocally stated 290,000 pages, and Merck/Schering-Plough's Deepak Khanna echoed the number.*

So what does that mean in terms of the number of trees sacrified (assuming that the paper supplied was not recycled)? Well if you buy into the idea that an average pine tree produces 80,500 sheets of paper, then just over 7 trees were required to produce the amount of paper sent by the 2 companies together to Congress.

*Ortho Biotech's Kim Taylor said that she believed her company had supplied something considerably less than 290,000 pages but didn't know the exact number.

Thanks be to Pharmalot for providing the live feed of the hearing.