What’s So Bad about Recycled Paper?

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro writes about green business practices for The Inspired Economist. I checked out one of her blogs about greening print marketing. She gives reasons why marketers should consider using recycled paper in print marketing. She cites some pretty impressive and scary statistics:

· Globally, according to the Environmental Paper Network, 70 percent of trees used for paper pulp comes from biodiverse forests as opposed to tree farms, much of it from endangered forests.

· Illegal logging has destroyed or degraded 80% of the world’s ancient forests.

· U.S. pulp mills consume 12,430 square miles of forests around the world each year, an area almost the size of the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

Scary, yes? So what’s so bad about recycled paper that more marketers aren’t using it? Demolishing forests for more virgin paper stock that is “bright white” is contributes to global warming because the trees hold in carbon dioxide. When the trees are torn down, the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go but up into our atmosphere.

A marketer could state that the recycled paper just doesn’t look as good as virgin paper. Virgin paper isn’t as “bright white” as virgin paper because of the recycling process and because recycled paper isn’t bleached to make it white. I’ll agree that light gray paper doesn’t make colors “pop” like white paper can, but as a consumer, I must say that I would rather buy from a company with light gray recycled paper than I would from a company whose marketing materials are “bright white.”

The higher the post-consumer waste (PCW), the better. PCW is the amount of the paper that came directly from recycled consumer goods. The higher the percentage, the more waste that was kept out of the landfills. To find a paper company that you can get quality recycled paper from, check out http://www.celerydesign.com/paper/matrix.html. It’s the Ecological Guide to Paper in a handy chart form that tells you how much PCW is in the paper, whether chlorine was used to bleach it and is divided by coated, uncoated and other categories of paper. It lists over 30 companies, along with the type of paper the companies make that is recycled. It also gives the weights of paper, so if you want to find Bond/Copy Paper, just look for the “B” in a circle notation. If you need cover paper, look for the “CV” in a circle notation. There’s a legend at the bottom of the chart that tells you all you need to know to understand the chart.

When it comes to cost, that could be the biggest reason why more marketers don’t use recycled paper. However, the costs are coming down and certain types of paper, like letterhead paper, cost the same or even less than virgin paper. Thicker types of recycled paper can cost from 3 to 10 percent more than their virgin counterparts, but if using recycled paper helps your brand’s image, I say it’s well worth the money.