Commentary: The Paper Chase

The year 2003 will be remembered as a successful year. Thanks to millions of consumers, thousands of municipal recycling programs, state recycling organizations, corporations, government agencies and schools across the country, we achieved a 50 percent paper recovery rate. A total of 49.3 million tons of paper were recovered for recycling in the U.S., a significant milestone in paper recycling history.

This recovery represents an increase of 69 percent since 1990, when only 33.5 percent of the paper consumed in the United States was recycled. Currently, Americans recover approximately 339 pounds of paper for every person in the United States, up from 233 pounds per person in 1990.

More than 80 percent of all paper mills in the United States use recovered paper to make their products, representing 37 percent of the raw material used to make new paper and paper products.

Still, greater collection of more high-quality papers is necessary to ensure the continued production of new recycled-content paper products.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER. Globally, the paper industry has invested billions of dollars in equipment throughout the past decade in order to recover larger volumes of paper.

As a result of this investment, industry research indicates that consumption of recovered paper will grow globally by 8 million tons per year for at least the next six years.

Recycling paper makes good economic sense, as recovered paper has become an internationally traded commodity used in mills worldwide to make new paper. The development of new recycling mills throughout the past few years has led to dramatic increases in the demand for recovered paper in both the domestic and export markets.

This supply will be squeezed by an anticipated 50 percent surge in U.S. exports of recovered paper. Most of that demand will come from Asia, particularly China and India.

Paper Tigers. Whether in Beijing, New Delhi, Shanghai or Bombay, local consumers are flocking to stores that you can find in almost any American shopping mall—Talbot’s, Ralph Lauren, The Gap, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, KFC, Gucci and so on.

This new demand, economist Woody Brock says, can be ascribed to "Chindia," a description of China’s and India’s combined emerging middle class of 600 million consumers. It’s a market the size of the European Union and the United States together—a huge emerging middle class that is driving consumption of all commodities—including recovered paper.

The Economist magazine agrees, saying recently that "China has witnessed probably the most dramatic burst of wealth creation in human history."

Sixty percent of the recovered paper consumed in Asia is supplied from the United States.

THE "Q" FACTOR. Dr. Peter Drucker has said, "Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality." This is a timely thought as we continue to grow our collections to meet demand. The quality bar has been raised.

What are we talking about?

We’re talking about contamination of recovered paper with non-fibrous materials like glass, plastics, metal or just plain garbage.

As a paper maker, it is extremely difficult to make high quality recycled content products with growing levels of contamination.

Commingled residential collections are starting to increase. However, we are losing a percentage of these recyclables to contamination. When these materials are processed, 17 percent is being rejected and winds up in landfills as a result. This runs counter to the original environmental diversion goals and actually increases the amount of material landfilled. This also works against the economic infrastructure that’s been in place, because it drives up costs.

Unless the trend toward commingling is accompanied by better education and more effective processing, we risk undermining the hard fought gains of the last two decades.

Your collection efforts benefit your community and our world. Don’t lose sight of this!

Weyerhaeuser is one of the largest paper recyclers in the world and applauds the efforts of everyone, including the 9,000 cities that deliver recycling services to their customers. We need to keep this forward momentum going.

We need every city in North America that provides recycling services to encourage residents to increase their participation in local programs through correct recycling practices if we are going to meet the global demand for quality paper. Short of this, we are missing an environmental and economic development opportunity.

We estimate there are approximately 40 million tons of paper available in the United States that could be recycled. Those of us in the paper industry want to work closely with all of you to recover this paper.

Greater recovery of these paper products will help to ensure a steady, reliable supply of recovered paper for the world’s paper manufacturers.

A RECYCLING SUCCESS STORY. For our industry, recycling truly has been the great American resource conservation success story.