This may be opening a whole can of worms, but here goes.
I recycle whatever I can, including cans, but since I’ve started, I have noticed what a huge proportion of my recycling is paper and cardboard, from junk mail to cheerios boxes. The other day on the radio (NPR, I presume), I heard that the United States highest export by volume, is scrap paper, which is put into transport containers, onboard cargo ships, and sent to China, where it is recycled into cardboard. My guess is that the recycling process takes a lot of water and is more profitable where environmental regulation is, let us say, less that strict. One can just imagine what must happen to the ink and other paper coating clays and chemicals that are left after the paper is removed. My question is this, is recycling paper really worth it, environmentally, from the presumed huge carbon footprint of shipping it so far, to the energy needed to recycle it, to whatever may be happening to China’s water supply and population? I would just hate to think that we are fooling ourselves into thinking we are “saving the planet” but just shifting the problem from our own landfills to China’s countryside.
Thanks for listening,
P.S. I submitted this to Cecil himself, but I bet I’ll have better luck with y’all
I’m not sure but paper is the thing I go to for avoiding other materials I deem harmful. Paper over plastic bags, paper cups and plates over Styrofoam, etc.
Probably not all that big, actually. Ships are coming from China to the US carrying assorted goods anyway, and they’re going to have to go back anyway, too. Slow-moving ships are one of the most efficient ways of moving things around to begin with, and there will be very little difference in efficiency between a ship making the return trip to China empty and making that trip full of paper.
If you want to talk carbon footprint, the bigger impact would be from the fact that paper in landfills is a form of carbon sequestration. Original paper (that is, non-recycled) is produced from scrub trees which grow very quickly, taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and unless you burn it, it stays out of the atmosphere. The more paper gets recycled, the less of those quick-growing scrub trees are grown, and therefore the less carbon gets sequestered in the form of paper.
Anyone wanting to plumb the depths of the subject should read Garbage Land, by Elizabeth Royte. Let’s just say that the answers are certainly not simple.
What’s wrong with cloth bags, and ceramic or glass cups and plates? Is it not better to avoid the recycling problem altogether by using reusable containers and dishes instead of disposable ones?
Zhang Yin is a Chinese businessperson who made a fortune of over a billion dollars by buying scrap paper in the US, shipping it to China and turning it into cardboard. Of course when that cardboard is turned into packaging for export goods, the whole cycle can repeat. So apparently it is worth it, to her at least. However, I suspect that with the downturn in the economy, the value of scrap paper has gone down, as have prices for other commodities.
There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s not like I use paper cups at home or anything. There are just times when you don’t have that convenience or are providing them for many people (like an office setting).
OCC (Old Corrugated Containers) price is actually up a bit recently, partially due to container shortage on the return trip to Asia. Approximately 70 -75% of OCC is recycled (typically by large retail outlets like supermarkets which compact empty corrugated shipping containers and sell them). At least in the shipping container segment, would you rather have OCC and KLD (box plant clippings, much more pure paper content) get hydropulped (where 90% the water gets treated and returned to the environment) or have tree farms harvested and replanted, with the old corrugated container sent to landfill?
Producing virgin paper (from trees) is a MUCH greater environmental issue than hydropulping. Sulfur emissions and the like come up without recycling.
Penn and Teller made arguments that recycling paper doesn’t save trees or forests because trees used for paper were grown specifically to be made into paper, and that if the demand for such paper would go up, the number of tree farms would go up too. They also stated that if recycling paper was truly worth it, there would be money in it (like there is for recycling aluminum, which is why you see homeless collecting cans instead of phonebooks).
Not sure how up-to-date their viewpoints are today, but in the benefits of overall recycling, the benefits of paper is one of the comparatively low when you factor in all the extra emissions and handling costs associated with recycling paper. Of course, at least one website claims to dispute this: Page not found!
In “virgin” paper mills (in the linerboard and corrugating medium business) the percentage of recycled material is generally dictated by the comparative cost between the wood (logs or chipped) and OCC, it is economically viable at large volumes, like I said above, large retail outlets with compactors, who sell directly to recyclers. Your average recycle bin in the kitchen may not, and probably doesn’t, come anywhere close to economically viable in the grand scheme. It needs the economy of scale commercial enterprises provide.
I’ve been in the brown box and brown paper business for 17 years.
OK, what we have there is a 2004 TV series quoting a 2003 article that used a 1989 study. In recycling, things have moved pretty damn fast in the last decade. It’s just plain out of date, no matter how entertaining Penn & Teller are.
As UncleBill posted, there is money to be had in cardboard, and even when I was a kid we made money for the PTA with paper drives.