Recycled paper has been around for quite a while now. Some businesses embrace it, seeing little price difference between new and recycled paper, and an opportunity for good public relations by helping to protecting the environment. Other businessmen remain apprehensive and skeptical, not sure if paper recycling is really helping the environment all that much, and wondering how good the quality can be in paper that is, by definition, used. How do you know if recycled paper is right for you? To help you decide, this article will explain how paper is recycled.
Recycling paper benefits the environment in two ways. First, by recycling paper, fewer trees need to be cut down to create new paper. Recycling one ton of paper prevents two tons of trees from being felled. Second, paper that is recycled is not sent to landfills that pollute our environment. Currently, about 35% of all trash consists of paper products.
To recycle paper, two things must be done. First, ink must be removed from printed paper. Second, the recycled paper must be re-pulped back into cellulose fibers.
Ink is removed from recycled printed paper though an industrial method known as the Deinking process. In Deinking, a combination of a chemical bath and mechanical agitation is used to separate the ink from the paper fibers. Recycled paper is re-pulped by mixing it with water and agitating it. This breaks down the hydrogen bonds in the paper, and it splits back into paper fibers (as anyone who has handled a wet newspaper knows from firsthand experience). After the ink has been removed and the paper broken back down into fibers, it can be bleached, pressed, dried, and cut into fresh, clean sheets of paper.
How good is the quality of recycled paper? Paper can generally be broken down into two quality categories. Groundwood paper is cheaper, but weaker and becomes yellow and brittle with age. Woodfree paper is stronger and more durable, but also more expensive.
Paper sent to be recycled is often the weaker, less durable groundwood paper, since this is the type often used for short-term purposes in offices and homes for things such as newspapers, phone books, and printer and photocopier paper. Some of the higher-quality woodfree paper, however, usually finds its way into the mix in the form of recycled magazines and catalogs. Consequently, as a general rule, recycled paper usually falls into the lower-quality groundwood paper category, although recycled paper is generally not as strong or as bright as papers made from new, original wood pulp. Fortunately, this also means that recycled is the same price or only slightly more costly than new groundwood paper.
This is not a hard and fast rule, however. The lower-quality groundwood paper can be recycled into the higher-quality woodfree paper though a chemical pulping process, so it is possible for recycled paper to be stronger and more durable than new groundwood paper. This increase in quality, however, is also reflected in an increase in price.
Finally, new wood pulp is sometimes added to the mix of recycled paper to increase the quality. Therefore, blended recycled paper tends to be stronger than 100% recycled paper. If you have concerns about the quality of recycled paper, chose mixed or blended recycled paper over 100% recycled paper.
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