THE U.S. PAPER INDUSTRY AND SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTION
by Maureen Smith The paper industry is based directly on natural resources. Paper begins at the forest with basic manufacturing stages to make wood into pulp, pulp into paper, and paper into products like boxes and paper for copiers, then moves on through a complex transportation and distribution system to publishers, retailers, offices, etc., and, finally, is either recovered for recycling or sent to landfills or incinerators. It is only when we understand these long commodity chains that we begin to get a handle on problems that are invisible to those of us who live far away in cities. When paper products finally arrive at our doorsteps, they leave huge quantities of waste, pollution, and depletion in their wake.
When a log goes into a sawmill, only about half of it comes out of the sawmill as lumber. The balance comes out as chips, shavings, and sawdust, no longer a waste product but a valuable commodity. The efficiency of using it is almost 100%. The use of this wood residue in addition to logs makes the paper industry the channel for more than 40% of the wood that we use in this country. If we found a way to take the paper industry entirely out of the forest, which is not as far-fetched as you might think, that wood would be available for any number of other uses.
The paper industry is a heavy chemical-processing industry. The goal of pulping wood is analogous to separating crude oil into its various constituents. In the case of wood, you're trying to separate out the cellulose from the balance of the wood structure, a process that involves a lot of chemicals. In the Toxics Release Inventory, which was created by the Community Right-to-Know Act and has become one of our benchmarks for tracking chemical pollution, the paper industry has consistently ranked third or fourth among all major manufacturing sectors in the United States. There are a lot of limitations in the Toxics Release Inventory, so it's only a snapshot, but we're dealing with some serious chemicals. For example, the Clean Air Act of 1990 set up a list of about 189 hazardous pollutants that were required to be regulated. The paper industry was identified as a major source for a number of them. Many are chlorine-related. A number of them are carcinogens.
Our per-capita paper consumption in the United States is now over 700 pounds per year, by far the highest in the world. Other major developed countries have substantially lower per-capita consumption. Sweden is the closest to us, having a highly developed economy and being a major paper producer. But in countries like Canada, France, England and Germany, per-capita consumption levels are 20, 30, even 40 and 50% lower than they are in the United States. The Europeans have been ahead of us in reducing packaging, which has helped moderate their consumption. Also, the way life is lived in cities like London, Paris, and other European cities is different. People are far more likely to buy their food on a daily basis. These and other differences in obtaining services and commodities involve a lot less packaging. Clearly, our per-capita paper consumption is wildly inflated. We could certainly reduce it by at least 25% without suffering deprivation. So source reduction--reduced per-capita consumption--would help, but a lot of other things need to be done as well.
Right now, about 15-20% of all the wastepaper we recover nationally is exported. In certain regions of the country that number is drastically higher. In California, between 55 and 60%, possibly even a little more, of all the wastepaper we recover is shipped out of the state, and the majority of that is going to foreign exports. The paper that Californians recycle contributes to abating our solid waste management difficulties, but it's not contributing to the most serious problems--virgin wood pulping and the impact on forests and chemical pollution. Anytime you export a basic raw material like logs or wastepaper, whether it's virgin or secondary, you're also exporting all the high value that comes later like the jobs, the tax base, and so on.
Think of it in terms of two related but distinct goals. On one hand, you're trying to shrink the wood-based paper industry with its intensive manufacturing processes and impacts on resources. On the other hand, you're trying to build up an alternative production system based on secondary materials like wastepaper and more benign alternatives like agricultural fibers. We tend to assume that one is going to lead to the other; that, for example, if we aggressively create recycling laws and become good household recyclers, this will immediately translate to reducing wood pulp production. These simple one-to-one relationships don't exist in a global economy. Because of that complexity, there is a much stronger need to understand paper as a system of production and consumption, as opposed to simply focusing on isolated parts of the problem like managing solid waste or managing toxic chemicals or forests. Cities don't exist in a vacuum. They have vast resource regions that support them. Unless a city is also sustainable with respect to those distant resources, it's not, in fact, sustainable.
Across the board, it's easier and less intensive to remanufacture secondary materials than to use virgin materials. All the intensive primary processing work has already been done, so it's much simpler to turn a pile of paper into pulp, than to turn a big log into pulp. A case can increasingly be made for the potential to prevent pollution and conserve energy through nonwood fiber use, although it is not as well documented as it is in the case of wastepaper. In using nonwood fibers you're dealing with material inherently easier to break down than wood. Joseph Atchison, a grandfather of our modern interest in nonwood fiber pulping, has estimated that in the United States the generation of agricultural residues, like wheat straw, rice straw, and corn stalks, is over 280 million tons per year. In terms of cellulose content, this amount vastly exceeds that of current wood use in the paper industry.
Seeing the big industrial/environmental picture gives us a way to understand relationships between environmental objectives and a wide variety of social objectives, like stabilizing and diversifying the agricultural economy, like providing a way to get off of price supports for crops, etc. The potential for using some of the waste materials from farms for value-added manufacturing like pulping has been understood for a long time. The best research that has been done on nonwood pulping has been done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A wonderful research project that began in the 1950s and was ongoing through the 1960s, resulted in a series of technical research papers evaluating the use of agricultural materials to make pulp from a whole range of different angles: how to pulp them, how to process them, how to recover them, the economics, the expectations for farmers. It was a very comprehensive body of research, but it resulted in nothing. We have never really backed up the potential that we know is there. We're waiting for the industry, I suppose, to pick up on it. But given the way the paper industry is organized--very intensive integration with the forest and the forest products industries as a whole--it is naive to think that the industry is going to run with a completely different alternative source of fiber. But the potential has been documented and has been known for decades.
The use of wood in paper, which dates only to the 19th century, is the newcomer. The modern paper industry is, in fact, defined by its use of wood. For a couple millennia before that, paper was based on nonwood fibers such as cotton and flax. The very first paper mill built in this country produced 100% recycled paper based on vegetable fibers, so there's plenty of precedent for it. To this day our federal bank notes are printed on nonwood fiber paper. There is nothing necessary about using trees to make paper. At some point, we need to quit discussing how to build a better wood pulp mill and start working more seriously on how to build, say, a really good rice pulp mill.
The central problem is figuring out how to transform an industry already organized around one material into an industry that is organized around a different set of materials. We've known for decades that we should not be subsidizing the use of wood if we're serious about a sustainable future for industries like the paper industry. Yet the federal subsidy for timber production is considerable, including everything from what it costs to manage our National Forests (a significant source of fiber for paper), to the cost of maintaining agencies like the EPA and all the state equivalents that regulate the paper industry. Our subsidies of energy also play directly into the paper industry, the second largest manufacturing user of energy in the country. These do not even count the unreimbursed external costs of production, such as loss of habitat or watersheds, and negative human health impacts.
To make this kind of shift will take some real political muscle. At the national level, the whole debate continues to be dominated by 15 to 20 very large companies, most of them wood-based, integrated forest-products companies. The main trade association for the paper industry is the American Forest and Paper Association, whose name clearly indicates what they think their fiber resource will be into the future.
The scale of the paper industry, with individual mills that produce as much as a million tons of pulp per year, is the most capital intensive industry in the economy--one billion to two billion dollar investments involved in the largest mills--with long transportation chains of thousands of miles that underlie the end products. The paper industry congratulates itself on using a lot of rail and cross-ocean shipping where transportation impacts are comparatively low relative to shipping by truck or airplane, but estimates suggest that trade in pulp, paper, and wastepaper (not including paper incorporated into other products as packaging) amounts to more than 10% of world trade by weight, so there is a significant transportation impact there.
We can look at the potential for different transportation scenarios and a higher number of jobs per unit of production when we think about what kind of industry is possible in the future--an industry that moves away from its current 70% dependency on wood, an industry that may instead be 70% based on wastepaper and agricultural fibers, an industry that reduces wood to a supplementary resource instead of its defining resource, and a much smaller scale, cleaner industry better suited to urban areas where wastepaper is found and better suited to farm areas which produce the agricultural materials.
A few years ago I was working with a community group in West Sacramento, who was opposing what would have been the largest paper recycling mill in the world--a monster mill, an archetype of the industry--which would have produced something like eight million gallons a day of wastewater and dumped it into the Delta. Each five million dollars of new capital invested would have produced, I believe, one job. There is much greater job potential in the combination of alternative fibers with smaller scales and different technologies. Such an industry can emphasize labor costs over some of the capital costs that are characteristic of the current industry, as well as reduce environmental impacts.
In California, our problem is not so much how to make the wood pulp industry shrink or go away, because we don't really have one. We have only two operating wood pulp mills, and they are not huge (one is the first totally chlorine-free bleached kraft softwood pulp mill in the U.S), so the opportunity here is to see what we can do with the alternative materials we have.
I'm involved in a project on the California paper industry, which essentially picks up where I left off with my book. California has almost no paper industry, and what industry it does have is mostly very old and quite moribund, producing well under 10% of our total paper consumption in the state. At the same time, we have a lot of wastepaper available, given the number of people in the state and our levels of paper use. In addition, we are a major agricultural state with large quantities of agricultural residues. We have, for example, a million and a half tons of rice straw. I'd guess that we must have three or four million tons of other agricultural materials as well. Paper can be made out of many vegetable products. Between the wastepaper and agricultural resources, we're sitting on top of secondary materials resources that could support not only a paper industry but a range of other fiber-based industries as well.
What does it take to begin the shift?
Maureen Smith is a Senior Research Associate with the Pollution Prevention Education and Research Center in Los Angeles. This edited article is taken from her interview by Jerry Brown on the We The People radio program.