Submitted: The Two Sides Team August 1, 2012

Your guide to paper and sustainability. July 30, 2012

by Boise Choices – Triple Pundit

Making sustainable choices doesn’t have to be stressful; it can start
with something as small as making a smart decision about office paper.
Paper selection can have a big impact on efficiency, waste and
contributing to sustainability goals.

There are many types to
consider when choosing office paper – recycled content, brightness,
basis weight, etc. Then there’s inkjet paper, laser paper, color output
paper and literally hundreds of others. Does it make a difference? In a
word, yes. We’ve compiled some tips for making better paper choices.

Know your logos

Last week we talked about FSC^®, SFI and other standard-setting organizations. These easy-to-spot logos help identify paper from certified sources.

What’s the story with your printer?

Today’s
printers can print photos and graphics at a very high resolution. But
in order to achieve a high-quality output, you need to choose a paper
that has characteristics designed for color printing.  Otherwise, you
may find that the results you intended don’t match the output, leading
to added waste.

If your printer is jamming, it may, in fact, be
the paper, not the printer. It’s important to store your paper
properly.  If you’re already following the storage guidelines, try
switching your brand of paper to one that is performance-certified or
that has a jam-free guarantee.  These quick tips can potentially save
your company budget from costly printer maintenance calls or purchasing
new equipment.

Get what you pay for

Have
you ever wondered why recycled-content paper often has a higher price
point than paper made from virgin pulp? Recycled paper has a more
complex supply chain and production process than virgin paper, and it’s
those extra steps that primarily account for the extra cost.

With
virgin paper, there are just three steps from the forest to the printer –
logging, milling and distribution. Producing recycled paper requires
many more steps – with the first (and often costliest) being used paper
collection and recovery.

Paper, re-imagined

In
most commingled, single-stream recycling operations, the paper gets
shipped to a materials recovery facility (MRF) for sorting by manual and
mechanical processes into separate paper grades. Then, it is sent to a
paper mill in bales, where the recovered paper is stored until needed.

Then,
the recovered paper gets re-pulped, heated and mixed to form slurry, or
a kind of “paper soup.” The purpose of this step is to break down the
paper into its fibrous elements – tiny strands of cellulose that form
the building blocks of most commercial paper grades.

No matter how
well it’s sorted, recovered paper often contains impurities that must
be removed before making new paper. Screening (running the pulp through a
fine mesh screen) and cleaning (spinning the pulp in a centrifuge) will
help eliminate metal, plastic or adhesive pieces (“stickies”) that can
affect the strength and uniformity of recycled paper products.

After deinking and color stripping (if necessary, based on the type of recycled-content material being produced), the pulp is now ready for papermaking.

If you’d like to see how this process works, check out the video of one of Boise’s paper mills in action.

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