Sweet reams (are made of this)
It might be junk mail or a Booker-prize novel, a sheaf of old emails or a mag like Green Futures: we may be living in a digital world, yet we can’t get enough of those sheets of dead tree. But is our love of paper destroying the world’s forests? Is recycled really better than virgin? And how can we green the paper chain? Here are some answers...
Remember all that talk of the paperless office? As the electronic revolution swept all before it, paper, it was said, would become as redundant as middle management, and filing cabinets consigned to obscure museums.
Our homes, too, would be liberated. The doormat would be something we wipe our feet on, not a soft landing pad for junk mail.
Fat chance. We’re drowning in the stuff more than ever before. In 1990-2000, UK paper and board consumption went up from 9.4 million tonnes to 12.9 million.
According to research by the University of Surrey and Hewlett Packard, email alone has led to an astonishing 40% increase in paper use. Professor Richard Harper, director of Surrey’s Digital World Research Centre, says: "Office workers create the document on their screen, then print it out and file it." Others might disagree - the editor of this magazine has never printed out an email in his life, preferring to carry their assembled wisdom around on his laptop. But public opinion seems to be with Prof. Harper. A survey of businesses across Europe found that paper is likely to continue to play a crucial role in office life. In Britain, 81% of respondents did not expect the office of the future to be paper free. Nor did they want it to be so, preferring to read emails and documents ‘off screen’.
But, you might say, so what? Should we be bothered? Well, only up to a point. The good news is that paper has a lot going for it in the quest for sustainability. It is mostly made from biological sources (wood, to you and me); left to itself it will decompose and merge back into the environment; and it can be repeatedly (though not indefinitely) recycled and reused. But there’s a way to go yet before that inherent quality is demonstrated in practice all across the industry. There are pretty hefty environmental impacts hanging off each link of the paper chain, from sourcing wood and converting it into pulp and paper through to its disposal in landfill or incinerator. Some of these apply to recycled paper, some only to the ‘virgin’ variety [see ‘Paper weights’ below].
There is no shortage of myths and misinformation around the paper chain, either - particularly when it comes to the industry’s raw material: trees. Some are the result of simple misunderstandings, but others derive from some rather selective ‘spinning’... So let’s bust a few of the more blatant myths.
- "We’re turning rainforests into Sunday supplements."
No, we’re not, and never have done. At least not directly. The average mahogany trunk would make short shrift of any mechanical pulper. Virtually all paper comes from softwoods. In a few places, however, paper has been made from plantations grown on cleared rainforest - one of the more spectacularly pointless pieces of land conversion.
- "Our appetite for paper is wiping out the world’s trees."
Au contraire. As the paper industry is keen to assure us, in Western Europe at least, there are probably more trees than 100 years ago. And, a fair whack of them owe their existence to the continued appetite of the paper trade for raw material. The industry has no interest in wiping out its one essential ingredient. Add to that the fact that only around 12% of the world’s wood production goes into paper and pulp and there’s no real evidence to support the claim that more paper = fewer trees.
- "Thanks to its policy of replanting trees, the industry is helping ensure the sustainability of natural forests into the far future."
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. This takes us into one of the most contentious, and fiercely contested, areas of debate. Put simply, there’s little doubt that, in most cases, the European forest industry is indeed ensuring that tree cover remains intact. But trees do not a forest make. There is a world of difference between, at one extreme, a monocrop of sitka spruce, nursed with chemicals and pesticides, scrupulously weeded clean of any other trees, and, at the other, a rich variety of different species and ages of trees and other forest plants, providing habitat for a wide range of forest wildlife. It may not be economical to harvest a viabletimber crop from the latter, but it’s stretching crediblity to describe the former as a ‘natural’ forest when it is about as natural as a wheatfield. And it is adding insult to injury to talk of sustainable forestry when old-growth woodlands are felled, to be replaced by tree monocrops.
So how does this translate to what’s happening on the ground? The last 15 years or so have seen a series of campaigns by environmentalists against the destruction of ‘old growth’ forests in places such as Scandinavia, Russia, and particularly the Pacific north-west of Canada and the USA, where some of the most notorious ‘clear felling’ was practised. Largely as a result of this pressure, the forest industry across much of the northern hemisphere has embarked on significant, if patchy, reforms. The worst clear-felling excesses in North America are a thing of the past, and most companies supplying paper have now signed up to the principles of ‘well-managed’ forestry, which include some provision for the maintenance of biodiversity and other features of a more ‘natural’ forest.
Much of Britain’s paper comes from Scandinavia, whose leading forestry companies all now claim to be taking environmental issues seriously, and applying sustainable management criteria to their forests.
The key question - since very few of us are going to take a hike across to Finland to find out for ourselves - is how to prove it. You could look at the label, of course. Many paper products now sport some green logo or other. Some are ‘official’ labels developed by organisations such as trade associations. Others are tools dreamt up by the marketing departments of manufacturers and suppliers to make the most of their product’s often flimsy environmental credentials.
Irritated by the plethora of often vacuous claims adorning everything from greetings cards to loo rolls, an alliance of WWF, wood products retailers and woodworkers set up the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), with the aim of drawing up independently certifiable criteria for sustainable forest management (for more details on the FSC, see GF16). After a slow start, the number of FSC-certified forests is growing rapidly, covering 24 million hectares worldwide - about 3% of the world’s production forest. The area has doubled in the last 12 months.
The FSC logo can now be seen on dozens of paper products, from notepads to magazines such as BBC Wildlife. The BBC is one of over 100 companies to have joined WWF’s ‘95 Plus Group’, all of whom have signed up to sourcing all their paper from forests which have been independently certified as well managed (at present, only the FSC meets that criteria) Others include Sainsbury’s, Boots, Tesco, Future Publishing, and printers Beacon and Polestar.
If that was the end of the story, that would all be very straightforward - and optimistic. Many forest and paper companies, however, along with national associations, do not feel able to subscribe to the FSC’s standards, and several have launched their own certification schemes. One of the best known of these is Scandinavia’s Nordic Swan label, which also makes claim to green virtues.
WWF aren’t impressed. "They’ve actually diluted the standards in the last year," says Katherine Graeme of the 95 Plus Group.
Gradually, though, there are some signs that the FSC and rival labels are looking for common ground. In Sweden and Finland, for example, the Pan-European Forest Certification Scheme (which groups various different national standards under a broad umbrella) is exploring a possible ‘bridging document’ to provide a sort of mutual recognition between the two. Elsewhere, though, the PEFC has been criticised as insufficiently rigorous. WWF’s Forests for Life campaign is particularly scathing, arguing that it "does not comply with the basic requirements for forest certification..."
Confused? You might well be. And it’s only fair to say that there are at least some in the forestry sector who really wouldn’t mind a touch of uncertainty, lest consumers put their collective foot down and insist on the FSC’s more rigorous standard as a minimum. WWF is encouraging publishers to switch to recycled wherever possible, although campaigns director Francis Sullivan admits that there are quality issues here. At the very least, though, he says, they should use FSC paper, which would involve no loss of quality. For its part, the Periodical Publishers Association says it recommends members to use FSC paper "whenever possible" - the only drawback being the fact there is simply not enough FSC paper to go round - yet.
So much for the raw material. But delivering the tree to the pulp or paper mill is just the beginning of paper’s environmental impact. It’s here, though, that some of the most dramatic improvements are being achieved.
Making pulp and paper is an energy- and water-intensive business which, in the past, has been chemical-intensive, too, with chlorine (used for bleaching) wiping out river life for miles downstream. Energy use is still heavy (although increasingly mills are generating at least some of their own power through incinerating their own waste products), but the use of noxious chemicals is rapidly on the wane, with elemental chlorine in particular no longer in use.
The UK’s paper mills have cleaned up their act substantially, cutting biological oxygen demand discharges by more than 90% and reducing sulphur emissions by over 80%. In the year 2000, UK paper makers used 25% less energy than they did in 1990.
Peter Ingram, a paper industry veteran of 40 years who currently heads ‘The Paper Trail’, a charity setting up a print and paper industry history centre, said: "The improvements over the last 25 years have been absolutely massive. Now just about every mill using river water is able to demonstrate that water going back into the river, if that’s where it goes, is purer than when it went into the plant." Billions have been invested in greening the paper mills, says Ingram, largely as a result of pressure on the industry by environmental groups. One area that needs more attention is that of water consumption: paper making uses a lot of water and, even in rainy England, that’s a finite resource, with boreholes in some areas being dangerously depleted. Leading mills are now working on reducing net consumption, largely through moving towards a ‘closed loop’ system whereby the water gets cleaned and reused.
Then there’s recycling.
Although the UK is under-forested it is highly populated: that means that there’s an ‘urban forest’ of recovered paper available for recycling. And the graph is moving in the right direction: this went up from 2.6 to 4.8 milliontonnes in 1989-99. Reuse in the newsprint sector is now running at around 60%. All the same, nearly 5 million tonnes of paper is dumped in landfill sites or incinerated every year, and a typical household rubbish bin contains 33% by weight of paper and board. Use of recycled paper could be boosted substantially if paper products were designed with it in mind. Cutting out unneccessary use of adhesives, laminates, varnishes and so forth can help here, as can using uncoated paper wherever possible: as well as reducing the net environmental impact, this also produces a higher fibre yield when the paper is reprocessed.
So what’s greener - recycled or virgin?
As a general rule, using recycled paper is the best environmental option. As Jan Kuiper of recycled specialists Paperback points out, recycling paper maximises the use of the fibres, increasing the amount of paper produced and used per square foot of forest. Its production typically uses less energy and fewer chemicals. Having said that, some virgin fibre will always be needed, as paper can only go through the recycling process a finite number of times (roughly six to eight, depending on its use) before its fibres are broken up too much to hold together. But it doesn’t have to be an ‘either/or’. Many papers now contain a proportion of recycled content. The trick, according to print and paper consultant Clare Taylor, is to use the paper with the highest recycled content consistent with the demands of the job.
Many people continue to associate recycled paper with a ‘worn’, poor quality look. While it’s true that some art-quality and highly glossy publishing still demand virgin paper, it is quite possible to produce a high-quality magazine using only ‘post consumer’ recycled paper. Green Futures, we hope you’ll agree, is a case in point!
Martin Wright / Tony Laycock
Paper weights
Clare Taylor prints out paper’s environmental balance sheet.
First, a health warning. Any attempt to summarise the overall environmental impact of paper - virgin or recycled - is hampered by the fact that this one product has many forms. The types and volumes of chemicals used, the amount of energy required and the by-products produced all vary according to the manufacturing method employed: even recycling processes differ considerably.
There are, however, certain general impacts that much of papermaking has in common - and this table sums them up, by providing a simplified guide to what’s involved in making a ‘standard’ office paper - and the differences between the recycled and virgin varieties.
| RECYCLED PAPER | PAPER |
|---|---|
| RAW MATERIAL Waste paper | RAW MATERIAL Virgin wood |
| Impacts: Collection of waste (transport) | Impacts: Forestry and harvesting. These include road building, and energy for cutting timber and stripping branches. Unless the forest is managed sustainably, these can involve reduction of biodiversity (especially with plantations), the effects of planting non-native trees (eg, use of agrochemicals, soil depletion), lack of access for local people, wildlife habitat destruction and damage to rivers. Many of these are exacerbated where ‘clearcutting’ is practised. |
| PULP PROCESSING | PULP PROCESSING |
| Summary of process: Repulping (put simply, mincing in a giant food-processor - reprocessed pulp does not require the extended cooking and bleaching needed for producing virgin pulp), washing to separate ink particles from fibre, screening and centrifuging to remove staples, adhesives, bindings, etc.), removal of ink particles by floating them off with soap and air bubbles, bleaching to brighten, drying for transport to paper mill. Impacts: | Summary of process: Debarking and chipping, digesting - pulping and extended cooking (to de-lignify, which is what prevents the paper yellowing the way newsprint does), washing, bleaching, drying for transport to paper mill. Impacts: |
| Note: Modern bleaching methods do not use elemental chlorine, which was formerly standard, and one of paper’s most serious environmental impacts. | |
| PAPER MAKING (both recycled and virgin) | |
| Summary of process: The paper making process is the same for both virgin and recovered pulps. Essentially, it involves mixing the pulped wood (or recycled paper) with 97% water and adding fillers to improve opacity. Then the mix is poured on to a very long vibrating mesh conveyor to spread into a thin film. At the end of the conveyor, the web of paper transfers to a set of steam heated rollers for further drying, when the surface is also ‘sized’ to seal it. It is then coated (if appropriate) and ‘calendered’ - polished by heated steel rollers much like a giant, multi-rollered mangle. Matt paper is lightly polished, gloss paper more so. Once drying is complete, the paper is reeled off on to huge jumbo reels, and cut to finished size. | |
| Impacts: Use of large quantities of freshwater (though this can be mitigated by reuse). Extraction and processing of china clay, calcium carbonate, titanium, starch and other materials used for fillers, ‘sizing’ and coating. Uncoated papers obviously have much lower impacts. Effluents: These are rapidly diminishing - virtually to zero in the better mills, thanks to improved waste treatment on site. Emissions: from energy generation (eg, carbon, sulphur and nitrous oxides) - although plants investing in biomass or other CHP, and, especially, renewables, produce far fewer; and from the process itself (such as dust, halons, suspended solids and phosphorous). Solid wastes include everything from packaging for chemicals to dried sludge - although this can be used for everything from soil conditioner to cat litter (thanks to its highly absorbent qualities)! | |
| END OF LIFE IMPACTS | END OF LIFE IMPACTS |
| Paper which is recycled never really ‘dies’ - it goes around again (the fibres that become too short through constant recycling form part of the sludge that is one of the process wastes). | If not recycled, paper either goes to landfill - where its leachate may seep into groundwater, and its decomposition produce methane (a potent greenhouse gas) - or it is incinerated (producing carbon emissions). |
| TRANSPORT | TRANSPORT |
| Throughout the process - from felling the trees to dumping waste paper in landfill or returning it to the recycling plant - there are, of course, all the impacts associated with transport. Some of this is international; all but 8% of the UK’s pulp supply is imported - mostly from Scandinavia or the USA | |
So what’s a sustainable forest
Although precise definitions vary, it’s broadly agreed that a sustainably managed forest is one that provides a renewable supply of timber in an economic fashion, but also a habitat for native wildlife, including non-timber trees, plants, animals, birds and insects. Particularly valuable ecosystems should be protected from interference, and the forest allowed to renegerate naturally as much as possible, rather than being cleared and reseeded. Local people’s rights to enjoy the forest and pursue their traditional economic activities should be respected.
Tips for paper buyers
Two valuable sources of information for people wanting to buy ‘greener’ paper are:
Paper Profile,
is a voluntary scheme set up by a number of manufacturers to give environmental information to professional buyers, enabling them to make informed choices.
The Paper Buyer’s Checklist,
is produced by the Sustainable Office Forum, to help buyers make better environmental choices when selecting paper. Aimed at general office users, so reassuringly non-technical.
8 September 2006
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