Welcome Note: Changes

Dan Sandoval

If you want to see how much the paper recycling industry has changed, look no further than the old newspaper (ONP) market. Twenty years ago, ONP collection was all the rage. Recycled-newsprint capacity was burgeoning, recycling facilities were being built to target ONP as a core recyclable, and many municipalities envisioned recycling ONP as a profit center.

Fast forward to today, and that reality has been turned on its head. As North American newspaper circulation continues to decline, newsprint producers are slashing capacity, switching to manufacturing other types of finished products, or, in what seems to be a more common event, filing for bankruptcy protection.

Reflecting the change in fortune for the newsprint industry, at press time Resolute Paper (formerly AbitibiBowater), the largest newsprint producer in North America, announced its plan to acquire a much smaller pulp producer as a strategy to diversify.

The decline in generation of ONP has been accompanied by an overall drop in the quality of the fiber being recovered for recycling. The days of clean grades of No. 8 deinking news or No. 9 overissue news seem to be rapidly disappearing. Replacing these grades are a host of hybrid grades that commingle groundwood paper with a number of other fiber types.

Depending on whom you talk to, this new ONP grade is either a low-value No. 6 news, at best, or a less-desirable mixed paper grade. Either way, traditional consumers of the No. 8 and No. 9 ONP grades are confronted with the need to invest in newer cleaning technology for the grades they handle or to pay more for the cleaner, and scarcer No. 8 grade.

It is worth noting that other recovered paper grades also are plagued by changing consumption habits, whether magazines, which also are facing declining circulation; office paper, which may be the victim of the "paperless office;" or cardboard, which could be affected by the trend toward extended producer responsibility for packaging.

The only constant in the paper recycling industry is change.

Dan Sandoval