Please recycle this message: Print 21 magazine article

The message about recycling of office paper isn't getting through - and that's bad news for printers whose livelihoods depend on servicing the business sector. Tony Duncan says it's time we did more to encourage end-users to do the right thing.

Increasing the recycling of paper is a good thing. And positive support for recycling by printing companies is a small but strategically important initiative the industry can undertake to drive environmental credibility with governments and customers.

This doesn't just mean internal recycling activity which most printers are good at. There is a simple message we must get out to customers: that printed paper is a resource which should be recycled. Most State governments have zero waste or towards zero waste policies aimed at minimising landfill, and whether we agree with the logic, supporting these policies is good for business.

Unlike many industries, we can communicate directly to every end-user of printed paper and simple messages eg "This product is made to be recycled" on every piece of print (and its packaging) are possible.

A low blow
You may have read recently in the mainstream media, or heard environmentalist Jon Dee talk on radio and television, that the recycling of office papers is at a disastrously low 11 percent. By 'office paper' they are referring to printed and unprinted paper used in offices, except for newspapers, packaging and tissue, ie most of the products you print and supply to your business customers.

And when our apparent 11 percent is compared to the newsprint recovery figure of around 76 percent, then the public message is of an industry that isn't acting responsibly. The only problem is that the figure is wrong.

The reason this 11 percent figure is being trumpeted is because some of the people involved have some not-so-transparent commercial reasons to convince your customers to use less of your product - and support the services they are spruiking. Surprise, surprise.

The real recovery rate is closer to 50 percent, although we cannot get an absolutely accurate percentage for a number of reasons. However, for the balance of this article, let me attempt to give you some ammunition (data) you can use when confronted with the argument that recycling of your products is a massive under-performer compared with other products.

Recycling - the facts
Starting with the basics.

The consumption of all papers in Australia is in the vicinity of 4.5 million tonnes per year, +/- 5 percent, as there is no way currently of counting the amount of packaging or print brought in with imported finished goods (eg TVs, computers, cars etc). Of the 4.5 million tonnes, 1.6 million tonnes is the commercial print market ie the products you make - everything from magazines to self-adhesive labels. In overall market tonnages, packaging is about 20 percent bigger than commercial print, newspapers slightly less than half, and tissue only one sixth.

We do know that Australian paper, tissue and board manufacturers used more than 1.4 million tonnes of recycled fibre and we exported over 1 million tonnes of all fibre types, primarily to Asian papermakers. So overall recovery of paper fibre was 2.5 million tonnes or 55 percent.

The balance include estimates of:
* 5 percent tissue - unrecoverable
* 7.5 percent archived magazines, newspapers, documents etc
* 5 percent used for other purposes (burnt as fuel, kitty litter....)
* 10 percent filler - the clays and carbonates which make up paper
which leaves around 20 percent missing - going to landfill. Around 1 million tonnes of all types of paper - cardboard, some newsprint and office papers.

There has been private research that confirms these figures, but generally this is by companies involved in the industry and is confidential to them. It would also be questioned as biased by any critic of the industry. So as an alternative, I thought it would be useful to check out third party reporting in the area using published government documents. Obviously no-one is suggesting these are accurate to the nearest tonne, however they are published by governments and can be used:

1. Victorian Government: Annual Survey of Victoria Recycling Industries (2004/2005). Appendix C: Materials recovered for reprocessing.
* Cardboard/paper packaging: 376 kt
* Newsprint/magazines: 200 kt
* Printing and writing: 262 kt
* Telephone books: 9 kt
* Other (mixed paper): 90 kt
2. Zero Waste SA: Recycling Activity in South Australia in 2005/06. Final Report.
* Cardboard: 107 kt
* Liquid packaging board: 1 kt
* Magazines: 6 kt
* Newsprint: 41 kt
* Telephone books: 2 kt
* Printing and writing: 19 kt
3. Zero Waste WA: Review of total recycling activity in Western Australia 2005/06.
* Cardboard: 94 kt
* Directories: 0.2 kt
* Newsprint and magazines: 86 kt
* Printing and writing: 12 kt
* Mixed: 14 kt
4. Queensland: State of Waste and Recycling in Queensland 2006. Materials reported by recyclers.
* Cardboard: 111 kt
* Paper and newsprint: 286 kt (the Newspaper Publishers confirm there is 96 kt of newsprint collected in Queensland.
5. NSW DECC Material Data Flows: Analysis of Printing and Communication paper flows in the NSW market (2007).

This research project is sponsored by NSW DECC and involves Industry Edge and a wide range of industry participants. The work has been underway for 18 months with several iterations and, as it also looks at packaging markets, provides an opportunity to correlate recovery figures. The 255 kt identified for office paper recovery is an initial number, which is not confirmed by all parties currently, but is agreed to be an acceptable initial iteration.

Adding this all up and allowing for a percentage of printing and writing papers collected in the unspecified 'other' categories, we can say that 94 percent of the population covered by these figures recycled 766,000 tonnes of printing and writing (office) papers. Not a bad effort, and in the ballpark with Europe and North America, although in many cases other governments do not get data on printing and writing papers to this level of detail.

Watch your waste
So what does this mean?
The data is important for a number of reasons. There is a growing push by governments for industries to manage their 'waste' or end-of-life products. The Federal government is supporting the States and Territories to launch a national product stewardship approach, and a template is being developed for the used tyre sector. This will be rolled out next year by the States and Territories, and other products will be evaluated for a national scheme from there.

With office paper, governments have expressed two reasons for considering it an important waste. Firstly, most state and territory jurisdictions are moving towards zero landfill policies, and see the quantities of paper ending up in landfill as impeding their efforts. Secondly, as paper is a re-usable resource, every attempt to get it back for re-manufacture should be taken. Governments are aware that exporters are screaming out for more fibre to sell to their markets in China and elsewhere in Asia.

Both arguments have positive and negatives: well-managed landfills are fairly benign although, over time, paper will eventually breakdown into greenhouse gases. Paper can only be recycled into paper 5-6 times before the fibres become unusable, and in Australia we do not have the population to support the defined quality streams of recovery they have in Europe. Likewise it makes little environmental or economic sense to transport small quantities of recovered papers large distances to factories or ports in the capital cities.

However, as an industry, we have to accept that recycling statistics will be one of the environmental KPIs on which we are measured, and ignoring them will see further erosion of support from government and customers.

Unlike the packaging or newspaper publishing industry, this industry is made up of small- to medium-sized companies who by themselves are unable to have much influence on the recovery of their product once it has reached the end of its life. A tonne of paper may not sound much, but when it is printed, cut down to A4 and distributed, that tonne becomes several hundred thousand individual products in the market. As such there is heavy reliance on the end user to act responsibly and place it in a recycling bin.

And then we must rely on the company this person may work for having a policy of recycling consumables, and there is a system in the building which allows this to happen. The cleaner must also be trusted to keep the recycling separate from the general rubbish (two trips around the floor and up and down the building?), and aggregate into the building's recycling bins, awaiting pick-up by the local recycler.

We know that CBD offices generally get this reasonably right - where there are systems. However, suburban and smaller offices often struggle to co-ordinate the process. In buildings with multiple separate small businesses, getting a level of co-ordination that provides a recycler with an economic quantity is difficult, and paper often ends up in the general waste. Likewise companies in offices without control over their cleaning contracts can find that as more pressure is placed on the cleaners to reduce costs, any attempt to add services such as recycling is compromised.

So who do we see promoting the recovery/recycling of paper and print?

Leaving it to Westpac and Qantas will not be a good thing, as they promote their own cost-down agendas with appeals directly to their customers and shareholders.

All suppliers of print have a vested interest to help promote recovery of paper. This doesn't require direct contact with every end user; however, a positive start would be, as suggested above, a simple message on all print and packaging leaving the plant. Please recycle this valuable resource.