For more than 200 years, botanists have been using newspapers to press plants that they have collected in the field. Go to any museum or botanical garden that has a pressed plant collection (called a herbarium) and there will be a backlog of specimens neatly pressed between the pages of various newspapers that were available in the region where the plant collections were made.
As newspapers become smaller in size, and some disappear altogether, botanists are concerned that their source of plant-pressing material will not be available. This is an example of an important secondary use of newspapers that we take for granted. I'm sure you can think of others.
Steve Young
Niskayuna