Chris White, who is president of the Recovered Paper Division at the Confederation of Paper Industries, was speaking last week at the two-day conference in Birmingham, the Recycling and Waste Forum.
He highlighted contamination pressures facing paper mills using recovered fibres to make newsprint in the UK.
On a positive note, Mr White said there was potentially up to 2.3 million tonnes of newspaper in the household waste stream that could still be collected for recycling in the UK, although around 20% would never be collected since householders use it for other purposes, such as animal bedding.
Glass within paper for recycling damages screening equipment
Chris White, President CPI
But, he said increasingly the economics of making newsprint from UK recovered fibre were being undermined by material quality issues. In particular, he identified glass and cardboard within local authority commingled collections as damaging equipment at paper mills such as his own company, Aylesford Newsprint in Kent.
Screens
Glass within paper loads can tear through screens used to keep contamination out of the papermaking process, while cardboard fibres end up producing unwanted spots in finished products.
“If you've got a poor quality product because it has rubbish in it, you can't compete with companies in Scandinavia or increasingly Canada,” Mr White said. Aylesford used to replace its screening equipment – at around £30,000 a screen – every 18 months. But now the company has to replace its 16 screens every three months, Mr White told the industry audience.
The CPI's recovered paper campaign, PaperChain, has supported a national campaign called the Campaign for Real Recycling, which was seeking to persuade councils against using commingled recycling systems, on the grounds that material quality could be affected (see letsrecycle.com story). Many councils prefer commingled collections systems because they are seen as being easier for householders to use.
In his address to the Forum, Mr White looked at the alternative actions available to newsprint mills facing increasing amounts of commingled material. He said starting their own source-separated collections “isn't going to happen” with councils all running collections although Abitibi-Bowater did provide a service. On cost grounds, he said paper mills were not keen to build their own materials recycling plants, and he was pessimistic that existing MRFs will improve their sorting quality since “input checking is poor and they're run too fast”.
Mr White said investing in heavyweight cleaning systems, as well as replacing screens more frequently, looked like the only option available. While expensive, he said it would less expensive than building in-house MRFs.
Using chemicals like bleach to clean recovered fibres would also be expensive and would be seen as a “step back”, he added.
Flexographic
A further danger to the UK paper mills is flexographic ink – the ink that some newspapers, like the Daily Mail, use so that ink does not rub off onto readers' hands. The material cannot be separated from paper fibres, because it does not float, he said.
“Flexo” inks are now “one of the main contaminants” in recovered fibres, he warned. “The UK paper industry is basically at its limit of flexo ink. If any other newspapers decided to go down the flexo route, it would finish us, as we have no way of dealing with flexo ink.”
Standards
Speaking at the same Recycling and Waste Forum paper conference, David Symmers of the Independent Waste Paper Processors Association, spoke of the work being carried out to improve European recovered paper standards.
He said the current EN 643 standard had a number of shortcomings, from a lack of defined tolerances of contaminants to inadequate grade descriptions across an insufficient range of grades.
A revised paper standard could help the paper sector deal better with regulators
David Symmers, IWPPA
With Chinese production expanding, recovered paper consumption was set to overtake pulp consumption in papermaking, he added. The European standard was needed to improve the marketing of European recovered fibre in the face of competition from abroad.
He suggested a revised paper standard could help the paper sector deal with regulators, who “don't understand that small amounts of contamination can be economically removed” and “don't understand that some types of papers can even be mixed together” in their regulation of shipment legislation.
“We need a standard that balances commercial practicality and environmental protection,” said Mr Symmers. “We need to find what materials are unacceptable, what is tolerable.”
Ideally, a global standard was necessary, he said, but on present grounds looked more likely to be based on the American standard PS 2007 than the European standard EN 643. Mr Symmers said work on the European standard would have to be undertaken before a global standard could be agreed.
European
The IWPPA is meeting with European paper federation CEPI and waste management federation FEAD next week to begin the discussions about revising the EN643, but the process could take 18 months to two years, Mr Symmers warned, since the needs of all European countries would have to be considered.
Discussions about a global standard could even take 10 years, he added.
The last revision of European paper standards was in 2001, but since then trade in recovered paper has expanded “significantly”, Mr Symmers said – in the UK alone, from 680,000 tonnes in 2000 to 4.6 million tonnes in 2007.
Progressive revisions of the standards have even reduced their effectiveness, he said, because some useful information on paper grades had been lost along the way.
“I hope the industry will support the need to, probably, look backwards to look at what we had in the old standards and get back to where we should be,” he said.
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