Making the grade

Indeed, supply and price are the key problems many cite as reasons for recycled paper’s ultimate failure to establish itself in the print market. On the supply side, getting consumers and businesses to put paper into recycling bins, and then getting the right grade of waste paper for print sorted and to the deinking and pulping stage, ready to go back through the mills, is still proving a tough job.

It’s made more difficult because each time a fibre is recycled, the quality reduces and so for fine and graphics papers, the life cycle of a fibre is quite short (some put it at around three to five trips through the recycling process) before it becomes unsuitable for use and moves down the chain to being used in things like packaging. So the amount of paper available to be recycled is limited, ironically, by more recycled paper entering the waste stream.

“The misconception of the man on the street is that he can fill his recycled paper with copier paper and it will come back as good as it was first time, but that is not the case,” says Bowler. “It degrades every time.”

This apparent supply issue is seen by critics as the main driver, or some say excuse, for a high price premium on recycled substrates. Fred Haines, UK sales director at Fedrigoni, says that supply issues directly lead to higher pricing. “Because there is a limited supply, there is a price premium for it. This has held it back,” he explains.

The printers agree. Alan Padbury, managing director at Westdale Press, says this could be seen clearly when the government switched to recycled paper.

“It was utterly clear to me at the time that a government initiative to use more recycled paper at a time when there were very few suppliers of recycled paper, effectively gave the merchants a bit of a bonanza. One could take the view, therefore, that the merchants gently throttled the golden goose,” he says.

“It is more expensive, so a buyer has to make a decision as to whether that is justifiable for their situation,” adds Richard Owers, director at Pureprint. “If the price was the same as non-recycled, then percentage being used would be much greater, but there isn’t as much supply as with the virgin paper.”

However, Arjowiggins, the leading supplier of recycled paper in the UK, refutes the claim that there are supply issues. Managing director David Cook says in terms of the products on offer, the demand for sizes and types of coated and uncoated substrate is met adequately. In terms of ability to scale up capacity, he also says there are no issues, and so it is not supply that drives up the price.

“We’ve not run into problems in terms of supply, we have enough capacity still to significantly increase sales and not encounter issues,” he explains.

That said, some could pinpoint the recently launched Arjowiggins and Antalis McNaughton Full Cycle programme as evidence that in fact there is a supply issue. Launched in December last year, the scheme is a partnership with waste management company Biffa that will see waste paper collected from printers and transported to Arjowiggins mills where it will be turned into recycled paper.

Cook counters that the scheme is actually about economics, not supply. The price of waste paper has doubled in the past 12 months, he explains, and so the scheme is about getting some stability of costs. He and Antalis’s Brown acknowledge that price is a factor in recycled paper’s fate – at the high point of the boom years recycled was a justifiable cost, but when recession hit, the budgets couldn’t accommodate the premium – so this is about trying to manage the price.

“The reason for that lack of recycled paper out there appears to be commercial, in that if you look at the graph of the demand downturn, it corresponds to the general economic downturn we have gone through,” says Brown.

Both argue that there is not a lot they can do to offset this, beyond schemes like the Full Cycle campaign to control waste paper costs. Cook explains: “Recycled is more expensive, largely because the cost of the pulp is different. The waste paper, the sorting of that waste paper into the highest quality – that costs more – then that paper has to be deinked and turned back into pulp. Also, there are some differences in the process. Recycled fibres hold water longer than virgin fibre, so you end up having to run the machines slower in order to dry the fibre. So there are elements like this which takes the cost of recycled slightly higher than non-recycled.”

Bowler at NAPM acknowledges that this is the case, with grading and sorting paper an expensive business – after all, waste management is a multimillion-pound industry, not a charity sector where recycling is done pro bono.

But it’s not just price that puts some printers and clients off, it is also what they believe is the inferior quality of recycled paper. The argument goes that the performance on press of recycled papers is not always the best.

“The performance of the recycled paper often did not match the virgin paper,” reveals Padbury, who rarely uses recycled grades nowadays as only a few clients specify it. “There were occasions when it was unreliable and variable in quality.”

“Recycled paper is not as good as high-quality virgin paper,” agrees Sam Neal, managing director at Geoff Neal Litho. “We experienced more complaints and issues on recycled paper than we did on normal, good-quality FSC virgin paper. The finishing of recycled paper can be difficult as well, as the fibre quality is unknown; with virgin paper you know the product you are putting in. Hence, cracking will occur on recycled paper more than virgin.”

Owers counters that, while he accepts there can be quality issues, he doesn’t see them as defining. “Qualities in the coated papers especially are sometimes not as good as the virgin papers, but the differences tend to be pretty marginal,” he says.

Unsurprisingly, the merchants also give short shrift to the quality concerns. PaperCo national accounts director Mike Rust says “the reduction in recycled papers consumption has nothing to do with quality or printability, which today is generally on a par with virgin stocks”, while Haines says that “there aren’t any issues regarding performance – it is increasingly difficult to find any differences between the grades.” Haines adds that some clients even choose recycled papers purely for its performance, as they wanted the look or feel of the paper. So why are printers having problems? Arjowiggins’ Cook says that looking at the stats, they aren’t.

“If you compare our virgin coated sales and our recycled coated sales, we monitor very carefully what the complaint ratio is per 100 tonnes of sold product. There is absolutely no difference in the complaints between the two,” he says.

Antalis’s Brown adds that recycled paper gets a bad rap because it is an easy scapegoat. “In terms of performance, I think that the notion that recycled performs worse on press is a bit of a myth,” he explains. “We can’t afford for there to be any differential and I don’t think there is. What I think happens is that when a problem occurs with recycled paper, the printer is quick to pinpoint the fact the paper is recycled as the issue. The reality is that they could have had the same issue on standard paper and in that situation they’d just change the batch. When it’s recycled, they immediately tar the whole notion of recycled.”

RECYCLED PAPER FACTS
After extensive research, Arjowiggins has released a number of statistics and figures that it believes will stand up to scrutiny and really make the case for recycled paper. Here are some of the key points:

•     Producing one tonne of recycled paper (related to Cocoon 100%) uses 27,000 fewer litres of water than producing non-recycled paper. The water saved is equivalent to one person’s water usage for 180 days
•     Manufacturing one tonne of 100% recycled paper (relating to Cyclus) emits 428kg of CO2 compared to 800kg emissions per tonne of non-recycled paper. The emissions saving is the equivalent of driving from Paris to Moscow
•     Every tonne of 100% recycled paper (Cyclus) purchased saves 5,736kWh of electricity. The energy saving is the equivalent to the annual energy consumption of a three-bedroom house
•     Recycling 8.6 tonnes of paper in the UK and avoiding landfill saves 11 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. The savings on carbon is equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the road