Paper Issues

Just one tonne of recycled paper saves approximately six mature trees and 3.3 yards³ of rapidly diminishing landfill space.

The pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It uses vast amounts of water and energy and produces signficiant amounts of pollutants and landfill waste.

Recycled paper is the greenest option overall – it uses up waste paper and its production requires less energy and fewer chemical

Impact of paper on the environment

• It's energy intensive – The pulp and paper industry is the world’s fifth largest industrial consumer of energy, according to Worldwatch Institute. However, some producers use the by-products of the pulp production process as bio-fuel, virtually eliminating their carbon dioxide emissions.
• It uses huge amounts of water – but less if recycled within the factory.
• Coatings, fillers and optical brighteners eg. china clay, calcium carbonate, titanium and starch must be extracted, processed and transported, and all this requires energy. If these products are eventually recycled, the residue from the fillers and coatings is usually sent to landfill, although it's sometimes used as soil conditioner and occasionally even for road building.
• It generates large amounts of pollutants and waste – whilst waste treatment, especially in European mills, has improved in recent years, many mills still release a variety of pollutants into the surrounding air and water.
  
  Some of these are greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change. Others can affect the more immediate surroundings that local people and wildlife rely on and contribute to air pollution, acid rain and the degradation of freshwater and marine ecosystems.
  
  The paper making process also generates large amounts of solid waste which must be disposed of, most notably the sludge from the fillers, coatings, wood fibres etc.

Why use recycled paper?

It uses less energy and creates fewer emissions than virgin paper

The process of felling trees, transporting them for processing, the pulping and manufacturing processes, and the distribution of the resulting paper uses a large amount of energy – mostly from fossil fuels. Recycled paper requires only a fraction of this processing, using between 28 and 70% less energy.

It supports UK recycling companies and provides a market for UK paper waste

Nearly all virgin fibre used in the UK is imported, and some waste paper exported, so it makes sense both environmentally and economically to support home-grown paper recycling schemes.

It reduces the amount of waste paper going to landfill

In the UK it is predicted that we will run out of landfill sites during the next decade. Landfills will be replaced by incinerators whose toxic fall-out has been proven to be harmful to human health.

In addition, as paper biodegrades it produces the greenhouse gas, methane.

What is recycled paper?

Superficially it’s quite straightforward: waste paper and board is collected, sorted and then purchased by paper mills to be re-used.

However, there are different definitions of ‘recycled’ within the industry – paper can be called ‘recycled’ when only a percentage of the fibre is actually recycled. There is also a big difference between post and pre-consumer recycled waste paper (see glossary). Look out for the percentage of post consumer recycled waste when choosing a paper.

Generally speaking, fibre for re-use is pulped, screened to remove unwanted items such as staples and adhesives, and de-inked – it may or may not then be re-bleached using hydrogen peroxide which is also used to bleach virgin fibre. The extent to which each of these processes is undertaken depends on the desired final product and the condition of the waste paper.

The quality of the original waste fibre will dictate how it is re-used – good quality white waste will be re-used in high quality recycled or part recycled papers; at the other extreme, low-grade recycled packaging will be re-used (again) for packaging materials.