When people in the printing industry want to make a clear environmental statement, recycled paper is by far the most commonly used mechanism. The best thing about using recycled paper is that it requires hardly any significant effort or additional thinking on one’s part in the production chain.

It is generally taken as an absolute immutable fact that recycled paper is beyond reproach when it comes to its environmental credentials. Anyone who might have the gall to challenge the ecological value of recycled paper might just be taking on the world. Such investigation could be considered as socially irresponsible as questioning the merits of free public education.

The point needs to be made that while recycled paper has been a rock solid part of the industry’s armoury of environmental actions, the fact is very few people have searched to really find out if recycled paper is good for the environment at all.

I have been doing some research recently to determine what sort of pulp and paper-making processes are the absolute best for the environment. I took the sustainability reports from a number of international paper manufacturers from around the world.

Most companies have a number of individual production sites, each making different type of pulp and paper. I categorised the individual mills into their particular product areas. I ended up with three main types of pulp and paper production.

· Recycled. Any mill that produces paper from post-consumer recycled fibre.
· Separated. A paper mill that does not have its own pulp mill on the same site. Therefore, any pulp used must be transported to the mill. Virgin fibre (ie, not recycled).
· Integrated. Any mill that has its own pulp manufacturing on the same site.

I didn’t concern myself with forestry arguments at this stage of the research, nor did I consider the emissions and effort required for the collection of recovered waste paper from the community. The only measure I used was the reported emissions it takes to produce one tonne of paper using energy that was either produced on site, or additional purchased energy from the country’s national grid.

As a general rule, paper manufactured using recycled fibre emits around 800kg of CO2 per tonne of paper. In the case of a separated production facility where only virgin fibre is used, the emissions are around 500kgs per tonne. In a fully integrated pulp and paper mill, the emissions of CO2 can be very low, but on average around 200kgs of CO2 per tonne of paper. So it does beg the question, if recycled paper has always been considered so good for the environment, why has no one noticed that using recycled fibre produces so much CO2?

Not everyone has been fooled by the myth of recycled paper. In a study carried out in Sweden at the University of Agricultural Sciences in 1997, Stig Bystrom and Lars Lonnstedt concluded that “increased utilisation of recycled paper is harmful for the environment.”

Phillip Lawrence spent many years working in the paper sector and is now a consultant and public speaker who specialises in print and the environment.

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