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PART I: RECYCLED PAPER
In order to give you an overview of what's happening in environmental
printing and office paper markets, I need to start with a topic
that some of you probably think is passe. Nowadays when I talk about
recycled paper I get responses like, "I thought that was all
taken care of," or "Oh, that's SO last millennium!"
or a bored sort of "Been there, done that." So my primary
message today is that many may have been there, but not nearly enough
have done that, because recycled paper is NOT all taken care of.
In fact, we're in real danger of losing it because paper manufacturers
and suppliers are hearing so little demand for it.
At its height in the early 1990s, recycled paper had about a 10%
share of the printing and writing paper market. However, those of
you who have been purchasing paper for a while most likely remember
that ALL paper prices, both virgin and recycled, shot up in 1994-95,
at the same time that most companies and governments had gone through
several years of downsizing. The result was that many people stopped
asking for recycled paper because it was more expensive than virgin,
and when the prices came down again, they didn't go back to recycled.
Since then, recycled paper has been losing market share. My conversations
with mill managers suggest that it has dropped from that high of
10% to now about 6-7% and it's still slipping. Some sectors are
doing better than others. Both the American Forest & Paper Assn.
and a couple of the manufacturers estimate sales for recycled copier
papers may still be up around 9% because people are focused on that.
But, in contrast, recycled paper use for magazines is below 5% and
other market sectors are similarly low.
What that means is that, in the year 2001, in the 21st century,
after more than 25 years spent developing commercial grades of recycled
paper, more than 90% of office papers, reports, books, magazines,
bills, direct mail, catalogs, and advertising - more than 90% of
this is STILL completely virgin paper, with no environmental content
whatsoever. By this time, I think many of us thought it would be
the other way around, with environmental paper making up 90% of
the market. But it's not.
The result is that:
- Printers and paper merchants are hearing so little demand for
recycled papers that they're discontinuing carrying some of them,
which then makes it harder to get them,
- Paper manufacturers are hearing so little demand that they're
not interested in expanding their lines, increasing their environmental
content, or investing in new technology, and
- A dozen mills that make recycled paper have closed down over
just the past year and a half, including three deinking mills.
They're not closing BECAUSE they made recycled, but as the paper
industry is consolidating and updating its technology these days,
they see no compelling reason to keep them open, nor to replace
that loss with new equipment in the newer mills.
In other words, the situation for recycled paper is dire, and this
is a make or break time. Not only that, but I believe that if we
lose recycled paper because there's too little market demand for
it, then we don't have much hope of developing other types of environmental
papers, either.
Printing and Writing Sector in Context
Why does this matter, and what are the environmental implications?
Printing and writing paper is the second largest sector within
the paper industry. It makes up well over one-quarter of paper production,
almost four times as much as newsprint. Yet even the American Forest
and Paper Assn. reports that less than 5% of the overall fiber in
printing and office papers is recycled content - and they're including
a lot of preconsumer materials in that percentage.
All the high numbers you hear publicized about recycled paper products
being produced are about packaging, tissue and newsprint, not about
printing and office papers. However, the kinds of fibers that go
into printing and office papers could be recycled over and over
again, so that each fiber could reduce demands on forests, energy
and water many times over, some industry people say up to 8-12 times.
That's not possible in other paper industry sectors. Fibers only
get recycled once, for example, when they go into tissue. So for
environmental sustainability, we need to get more recycled content
into printing and writing papers.
Why Is This Happening?
Ironically, I think much of the problem is psychological, along
with misinformation. It's not really quality or price, because those
are the best they've ever been. But, for one, people now seem to
believe that all paper has recycled content, so there's no need
to ask for it anymore. The reality is that if they don't ask for
it, they won't get it.
With little support from the public, nor from staff or customers,
not as many purchasers are making sure to specify recycled as they
did in the past. I realize that it's not all up to purchasers to
make this change happen. Support also has to come from top leadership,
from those who specify the products for purchasers to buy, and from
those who use the products. While that exists in some stellar areas,
that kind of support unfortunately is still too rare.
In some cases, that seems to be because people are operating on
vastly outdated information about recycled paper. Sometimes they
believe myths about poor quality that have been debunked over and
over in tests and studies. But often they just believe that there's
no need to focus on recycled anymore, and they're on to other issues.
Compounding that are some printers, distributors and copier service
maintenance technicians who discourage customers from using recycled,
and so their customers back off. That creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy, of course, because then the printers and distributors
figure nobody wants recycled paper because they're hearing so little
demand. In fact, to help counteract some of this, both the City
of Los Angeles and NASA now write into their copier service contracts
that the maintenance technicians are not allowed to blame problems
on recycled paper, and the State of Massachusetts requires copier
equipment suppliers to train service technicians in the use of recycled
paper in their machines.
When the mills don't hear demand for recycled papers, they are
more likely to build new capacity in other countries or to take
advantage of the cheap foreign virgin pulps coming into the U.S.
now. That makes their papers less expensive in the short run, but
of course that doesn't mean they're without cost. In fact, people
in South America and Asia are paying the cost right now as their
lands are being deforested, while pulp mills in the U.S. are losing
their markets. However, if we were insisting on recycled content
in our paper, our pulp supply would be HERE, because this is where
the wastepaper is. There is also a new concern I've been hearing
a lot recently. Major purchasers are starting to tell me, "Well,
I might be willing to switch to recycled, but I buy so much paper
that I'm afraid I'll buy out the market, or if a number of other
large purchasers switch at the same time, there won't be enough
recycled paper for us." And I tell them, "We should be
so lucky!"
But just to be sure that it's not an issue, and because I know
that many people want proof, Conservatree has been working on a
deinking capacity study with the Alliance for Environmental Innovation.
We're studying how much postconsumer pulp is being made, how much
could be made, and how long it would take to ramp up if there were
a sudden big demand. We'll publish the report in January and an
article about it in Resource Recycling magazine in February, but
we've already published a preliminary report which estimates that,
for the catalog industry alone, an additional 20% of all the catalogs
today could switch to recycled paper at the same time and not only
would there be plenty of recycled paper for them, but that wouldn't
even touch the additional recycled paper capacity that all the other
paper sectors could use as well.
Why Should People Ask For Recycled Paper?
With all this doom and gloom I've been reporting, you might be
thinking that if demand is dropping, maybe there's a good reason
for it. What's so frustrating about this situation is that recycled
paper has solved all the problems that people have complained about
over the years, and STILL people are not buying it.
Conservatree keeps a running, and updated, list of environmental
papers on our website and at this time, there are nearly 500 recycled
papers available in the U.S. and Canada. Recycled paper is now made
by the best paper companies in the world, and it's exceedingly high
quality.
In fact, in 1998 the federal Government Printing Office tested
30% postconsumer copy papers against 20% postconsumer and virgin
copy papers. After running over two million sheets through both
copiers and printers, the results conclusively showed that the 30%
postconsumer copy papers performed just as well as the other papers.
A few years ago, Conservatree surveyed all the copier equipment
manufacturers to ask whether recycled paper was appropriate to use
in their copiers. Every single one of them said they had no problem
with recycled paper being used in their copiers, and several of
them added that the content of the paper didn't matter, the only
thing that mattered was that the paper was good quality - and there
are a lot of high quality recycled copier papers these days.
Price
Now I know that one of the big sticking points is price, and despite
what I can tell you generally about pricing, each of you has your
own experience with it and that may differ from what I can say.
But I hear about price impacts from all over the country and for
the past couple of years, consistently people have been saying that
either they can get recycled paper at the same price as virgin paper,
or that the price differential is only 3-5%. In fact, International
Paper reported at a Recycled Paper Coalition meeting this summer
that they are making and selling some of their recycled copy paper
at the same price as virgin.
Yet I know that many of you can tell me that you're seeing price
differentials and you ask why. Here are some of the factors that
affect price:
- Geography - Many papers are only available on the East Coast
or the West Coast but not both, and the cost of shipping them
out of their region is very high. So look for the papers that
are either made in your geographic region or that are sold through
national distribution systems to get the best price.
- Sometimes people tell me of enormous price differentials, as
high as 50% or more. But those turn out to be because the papers
being compared are not equivalent. If a paper merchant offers
you a recycled text or opaque paper as a replacement for a virgin
offset paper, of course there's going to be a big price difference
because text and opaque paper costs more, whether it's virgin
or recycled.
- Some mills have more favorable economics for making recycled
paper than others. As a purchaser, you don't need to know the
configurations of all the mills, but it's a factor in why some
recycled papers cost more than virgin.
- Also, most of the virgin commodity paper - that means primarily
copier and offset - is made on huge, world-class paper machines,
while most of the recycled paper is still made on smaller machines
because there's not enough demand to put it on the big machines.
Just the economies of scale right there puts a price premium on
the recycled, which actually makes it pretty amazing that nevertheless
recycled paper has cut its price differential so significantly
over the years.
- The paper industry is also in a very challenging downturn right
now, so some of the virgin paper mills are dropping their prices,
sometimes even below cost, just to keep their machines running,
and that can create more of a gap with the recycled paper price.
So What's A Purchaser To Do?
First of all - and the bottom line, in my book - is to insist on
recycled, no matter what. A lot of purchasers don't even bother
to ask for price comparisons between virgin and recycled paper anymore,
they just specify recycled, and that's an essential tactic to take
now, when we have to build up the markets.
But that doesn't mean that you have to accept exorbitant prices
or face lots of problems. Rather, solve those problems and help
people adapt to using recycled paper. If your staff is complaining
that recycled paper jams the copiers, remember that there are millions
of copiers all over the U.S. that are running recycled paper just
fine, so it's probably NOT the fact that the paper has recycled
content. But clearly it is SOMETHING, so you need to track down
other sources for the problem so it can be fixed.
If you're getting very high price quotes for recycled paper, negotiate
them down. The paper markets are very soft right now and you have
a lot of leverage.
Last year I gave a talk about environmental papers to a group of
companies. One of the purchasers went back to her company vice president
and told him that I'd said recycled paper prices were within 3-5%
of virgin paper prices. He said, "If it's under 5%, go ahead
and convert to recycled copier paper." But when she went to
her office products supplier, she was told, "Oh, no, recycled
paper will cost you 12% more." She was stymied at first, but
then she went back to the supplier and said, "We're committed
to buying recycled. I'm going to look for better pricing."
Suddenly, they changed their quote and said, "What do you know?
Now we can provide recycled copier paper to you at the same price
as virgin paper." Being determined can change the picture.
Some grades of paper are the same price now whether they're virgin
or recycled. If you're using text and cover grades for letterhead,
business cards, or brochures, there's no excuse anymore for using
non-recycled paper. Those papers are very competitively priced and
recycled sometimes even costs less than virgin paper. With copy
papers, you'll get the best prices on those with 30% postconsumer
content.
There's a trend right now for some offices to require purchases
of only 100% postconsumer content copier papers. I don't think that's
a good idea, for a number of reasons.
First of all, requiring 100% postconsumer excludes a number of
papers that I think are an important contribution to the environmental
paper picture. Not only that, but if we had a fully functioning
recycling system, where all the paper had recycled content, then
a policy of requiring 100% postconsumer content would not even be
technically sustainable. You always need some new fiber, whether
from trees or crops, coming into paper to keep the strength up.
So why make people think now that 100% is the best policy? They'll
only have to unlearn it later, and in the meantime I'm worried that
they'll ignore the papers with the lower percentages as environmentally
inferior, yet find it too difficult to buy the 100% postconsumer
that usually costs more.
Now I want to emphasize that it is great to BUY 100% postconsumer
papers - there are a number of very good ones out there. But it's
a bad POLICY to require it. The lower postconsumer content percentages
are all that many of the mills have the technical configuration
to make right now. We need to keep them in this market if we want
them to make investments in the future to expand the recycled content
and make more recycled papers as the market demand rises. So it
is GOOD to buy recycled papers even when they have less than perfect
postconsumer contents.
As far as other thoughts on dealing with price issues, I'm sure
you've heard suggestions to reduce your paper use through double-sided
copying and printing, and other source reduction methods, in order
to turn the savings on your paper budget towards buying recycled
paper even when it costs more. Also, buying in larger quantities
and simplifying delivery requirements always gives you better prices.
I also want to emphasize that it is critical that the demand for
recycled paper move into businesses, as well. Even if ALL the paper
the federal government buys were recycled - and it is still working
on that - that only makes up 2% of the printing and writing paper
market. State and local government paper purchasing adds another
13% or so. That means that 85% of the paper is being bought by printers,
businesses, and nongovernmental organizations. So while governments
are essential as leaders and models in buying recycled paper, we
will only create the big environmental paper markets we want if
businesses make a big commitment to it, too.
Governments can help with that by making sure that any contractors
are required to also use environmental papers for all government
business. That means when you send out print jobs, require the printers
to use environmental papers. When you contract out your copying
business, require the vendor to use recycled paper. When contractors
provide reports for you, require that they be on recycled paper.
And many governments are in the position to advocate environmental
papers to their local businesses. Some have been very creative in
coming up with advertising and technical assistance programs. Some
encourage local businesses to join the Recycled Paper Coalition,
which is a group of major corporations dedicated to increasing their
use of recycled paper, in order for them to get help from their
peers.
The bottom line is that it is essential now that purchasers and
their organizations be dedicated to converting ALL their paper purchases
to recycled options. If you're already doing well with some types
of paper, like buying recycled copy paper, then I urge you to tackle
the areas where you haven't yet converted the papers to recycled.
The federal government's minimum CPG requirements for federal agencies
make it easy for everyone, because they're good starting points
for specifying recycled paper and most of the paper companies that
have recycled papers meet at least those minimums.
PART II: BEYOND RECYCLED
I want to start by mentioning that Conservatree is beginning a
new
study into the controversies that are hampering environmental
paper market development. We want to gather all the different perspectives
on the issues involved and figure out processes to work through
them. We want as many people as possible to give us their views
on the issues. So please check out the questions and send us e-mails
on them, or give us a call, or answer the questions when they appear
on list-serves or in surveys. We want to hear from you.
Clearly, recycled content isn't the only key to environmental sustainability,
so let's talk about:
What's Beyond Recycled?
The short of it is, I believe: Very little if there's no demand
for recycled. But there's a LOT of potential if recycled paper market
demand becomes powerful.
Think about if you owned a paper mill and you had invested hundreds
of millions of dollars to make recycled paper but then the demand
evaporated and left you high and dry. Just how anxious do you think
you'd be to respond to new demands for tree free and other kinds
of environmental papers - especially since most of the research
and development of infrastructure hasn't even been done on those
yet? There are virtually no mills in the U.S. right now that pulp
crops, and only a handful that use non-chlorine-related bleaching
processes.
On the other hand, if customers were banging down the doors for
recycled paper and the market share for it was growing like crazy,
you'd probably be much more interested in exploring other environmental
papers that could give you a marketing edge.
In fact, there are a number of papers with other environmental
attributes. Some of these papers don't include recycled content,
but most of them do because people recognize that even if all our
paper were made from something like banana skins and they were all
chlorine free, we would still need to recycle those papers rather
than dumping them in landfills or incinerators. But when you DO
add other environmental attributes to recycled paper, that's when
you get the opportunity to get the "best of the best"
environmental papers. So let's briefly talk about what some of those
are.
"Tree Free"
There are about 50 papers available right now that include fibers
from either on-purpose crops like kenaf or hemp, or from agricultural
residues left over from grains and straw. This is where some of
the environmental paper pioneers are pushing the future, like Vision
Paper which makes kenaf papers that also often have recycled
content, or Living Tree,
which imports hemp pulp and mixes it with recycled content, or Arbokem,
which experiments with agricultural residues in making papers. Also,
Crane
makes papers that combine cotton with hemp or kenaf, Green
Field Paper Company makes papers from organic cotton scraps,
and Costa Rica Natural Paper
includes leftover banana stalks and off-grade coffee bean dyes in
their recycled papers. Some of the major paper manufacturers also
offer a few papers with tree free fiber content.
I think that part of the push for 100% postconsumer paper may have
to do with people wanting paper that doesn't cut more trees, so
I encourage you to look at some of these papers that combine non-tree
fibers with recycled and also often are chlorine free as well. For
the most part, tree free papers cost considerably more than virgin
papers or even than most recycled papers. In fact, they often include
recycled content in order to bring their price down.
But this price difference is all due to the fact that there's so
little infrastructure to make these papers, and there ARE areas
in which they can be competitive. Most of them are concentrated
in text and cover grades because that's where they are closest to
virgin paper prices. So letterhead, matching envelopes, business
cards, and brochures are good products for considering tree free
papers.
But there are tree free papers in other grades, too. Vision Paper
has a copy paper with both recycled and kenaf fibers. Living Tree
has just come out with a coated offset paper that includes hemp.
As is true overall in buying paper, you'll get the best price if
you buy in large quantities. So consider buying these papers by
the skid or for big print jobs, not just carton-by-carton purchases
where the prices are highest.
Also, some tree free papers are more opaque than other papers and
you can reduce the paper's basis weight to save money without losing
the quality you need. A few years ago Apple Computer printed a brochure
on Vision's kenaf paper that actually ended up costing them 15%
less than virgin paper because they could use a lighter weight paper.
There are also plans afoot to possibly build or convert some mills
that could pulp tree free fibers. But, again, I think the success
of recycled paper is going to have a lot to do with whether those
can make a go of it.
Chlorine Free
I haven't counted up exactly how many chlorine free papers there
are, but they are also grouped across all the paper grades. In the
past, the paper industry favored using chlorine gas to bleach paper
because it gets the paper so white and because it is good at removing
some of the organic material that degrades paper over time. But
chlorine combines with things like paper fibers to create dioxins,
which are hugely carcinogenic and are increasingly tied to a lot
of other diseases as well. So the paper industry in the U.S. and
Canada has been converting to what's called an Elementally Chlorine
Free system, or ECF. This actually uses a derivative of chlorine,
but it still dramatically reduces the potential for dioxin as much
as 90%.
But most environmentalists favor the types of Totally Chlorine
Free, or TCF, systems that a large percentage of the mills in Europe
have installed. They bleach with ozone or a number of other non-chlorine
options and produce no dioxins at all. At this time, there is a
lot of argument over which is better, and why, but more and more
paper buyers are convinced that papers that are completely chlorine
free are the best option for human and water health, as well as
for the environment in general.
The term "Processed Chlorine Free," or PCF, is used when
a chlorine free paper has recycled content because the recycled
fibers were probably bleached in their first incarnation in some
kind of chlorine based system. Interestingly, it's primarily recycling
mills that are able to provide chlorine free papers in North America
because they're working with fibers that come to them already whitened,
although there are beginning to be a couple of TCF options, also.
At its most basic meaning, Processed Chlorine Free simply refers
to recycled papers that are made in systems that use no chlorine
or chlorine derivatives. If the pulp is bought somewhere else, that
pulp has to be PCF, it's not enough for the papermaking mill to
say it didn't bleach it again. If the paper has virgin fiber in
it, that virgin fiber has to be Totally Chlorine Free for the paper
to qualify as PCF.
There is also a certification symbol that the Chlorine
Free Products Assn. gives to papers from mills it has investigated
to be sure they're operating chlorine free systems. To qualify for
this symbol, CFPA also requires the papers to have no old growth
fiber, to have 30% postconsumer content, and to be from a mill with
no current environmental violations. This is a valuable assurance,
especially right now in the chlorine free market. In the past, there
was at least one paper mill that was calling its papers PCF when
in fact they were ECF, although when they verified their papers
to Conservatree last year they did acknowledge that the papers were
ECF. Having a certification lets a purchaser know that the paper
is, in fact, what it says it is.
At the same time, this does not mean that there are no other mills
that are producing PCF papers. Some of the tree free papers are
PCF and there are even a few papers that are not bleached at all
when they're recycled. Ones that also offer PCF papers include Badger
and the 100% Eureka paper that is made with postconsumer fiber from
the Halsey, Oregon deinking mill that now belongs to Georgia Pacific.
When a PCF paper does not have a certification, then the purchaser
has to do more due diligence to be confident that the mill is truthfully
representing their paper. But there are a number of reasons why
a mill may not be willing to go through the certification process
yet still be telling the truth. I think we have so few paper mills
in the U.S. and Canada that have been willing to invest in completely
chlorine free processing that it's important to support them.
There is also debate about whether chlorine free processing makes
paper cost more, and a lot of it is fought out over studies that
I think are not comparable. But European mills say there's no reason
it should raise prices, and Ikea, the furniture store, has been
using PCF paper for its catalogs for nearly ten years and they find
no technical differences and no price differential.
Sustainably Forested
Just a couple of words about FSC-certified papers. First of all,
there are none at the moment in North America. There were 2 or 3
a couple years ago, but the mills closed that made them. But there
are several timber and paper companies now in the process of having
their forests certified by FSC so there may be some in the future.
However, only 30% of the fiber has to be FSC certified to qualify
for the certification, so you will still need to investigate the
other 70% to be sure your goals for sustainably harvested fibers
are being met.
There is also a push to identify old growth fibers in papers. The
papermakers are often able to identify which mills a purchaser's
paper came from, and then what forest areas generally supply those
mills, some of which may include old growth, especially in Canada.
But old growth fiber content is still very hard to pin down. That's
another reason to buy recycled and tree free papers.
So How Do You Put Them All Together?
When you start including multiple environmental attributes, I think
it does more than add up. Rather, I think that it helps the environment
exponentially. So I encourage you to become familiar with tree free
and chlorine free papers and find ways to include them in your purchasing.
In particular, I want to encourage you to buy papers when you can
from the paper companies that are pioneers on the frontier of environmental
papers. It's companies like Vision Paper, Living Tree, and Arbokem
which are showing us what can be possible in the future. Their owners
have kept at this against all odds - and I mean ALL odds - for years,
and we need them to keep creating the paper future.
I also want to urge you to support the paper distributors that
make a special commitment to the environmental paper market. On
one hand, it has been important for market development that the
traditional paper distributors started carrying environmental papers,
because they can often provide them locally and cost-effectively.
At the same time, they don't see it as their role to push the markets
if they're faltering; instead, they tend to discontinue carrying
environmental papers when demand is low.
But there are environmental paper suppliers like New
Leaf, Greg Barber and
Company, Treecycle, Greenline
Paper, Dolphin Blue,
Three Mountain Papers,
the Recycled Products
Purchasing Cooperative, and several others that have made a
special commitment to supplying environmental papers, no matter
what the market conditions. Oftentimes they have been the only place
where you can get some of these papers. Some of them are regional,
some of them sell primarily in smaller quantities, some primarily
in larger quantities. Some of them, like New Leaf, develop unique
papers across all the paper grades because they work with paper
mills to push environmental characteristics, combined with quality,
as high as possible. All of them are often the only place you can
get a wide choice of cutting edge environmental papers.
We need these companies to stay in business, because they're the
engines pushing the market development we need. So please make sure
they're on your bid lists, and specify their papers, and those from
the pioneering paper manufacturers, when you specify papers for
appropriate print jobs.
What these companies are doing is providing leadership in developing
environmental paper markets. And it's leadership we need. I hope
that EVERYBODY sees that as their responsibility, too.
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