Paper
Already more than six centuries old, paper recycling has grown substantially during the last few years and continues to expand. Many packaging materials, newsprint and tissues are made wholly or in part from recycled fiber. Its use in the manufacture of printing and writing papers is rising steadily.
Apart from good economic reasons, a major force in this drive to recycle comes from political and public pressure to reduce the amount of used paper that is landfilled as waste.
Cellulose - the natural substance on which all paper making is based - has the property of building hydrogen bridges while it is drying and removing them in an aqueous suspension.
This is the clue to paper recycling, for the recovered cellulose fibers are parted in the paper industry's pulping process. Sophisticated equipment and various chemicals are used to clean and condition the pulp so that the end-product conforms to the strictest standards of hygiene and cleanliness.
However, the same paper cannot be recycled indefinitely: successive repulping tends to lower the quality of the fiber until, in theory, fiber collapse occurs. So primary fibers are added to maintain strength and other qualities, and recycling processes can provide for damaged fibers to be removed.
Recovered paper may appear to be a single raw material. In fact it consists of several quite different types of paper and board.
The recovered paper industry collects material from innumerable sources, sorts and segregates it into various types, and processes it for ease of handling, transport and subsequent repulping. It uses many different kinds of modern machinery to fulfill these functions and carries out a most important secondary service. People who generate recoverable paper - from printing companies to domestic households - would have to pay for its disposal if the industry did not collect and process it. The more secondary material the paper and board industry uses, the fewer the costly problems for local authorities in providing means of disposal.
In terms of environmental pollution and energy consumption, recovered paper compares favorably with the production of woodbased pulp made by chemical or mechanical means. As fresh wood fibers are needed to guarantee paper recycling, so recovered paper and forest products complement each other, both ecologically and economically.
The paper recycling industry has to be economic, which means three things.
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First, the generators of paper have to see the advantages of making their material available for collection instead of allowing it to be dumped or destroyed.
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Second, the paper recycling industry has to cover its collection and processing costs.
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And lastly, the industrial users of secondary material have to be able to manufacture marketable and competitive products.
