Paper recycling

This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (July 2013)

The recycling of paper is the process by which waste paper is turned into new paper products. It has several important benefits: It saves waste paper from occupying the homes of people and producing methane as it breaks down. Because paper fibre contains carbon (originally absorbed by the tree from which it was produced), recycling keeps the carbon locked up for longer and out of the atmosphere. Around two-thirds of all paper products in the US are now recovered and recycled, although it does not all become new paper. After repeated processing the fibres become too short for the production of new paper, which is why virgin fibre (from sustainably farmed trees) is frequently added to the pulp recipe.^[1]

Three categories of paper can be used as feedstocks for making recycled paper: mill broke, pre-consumer waste, and post-consumer waste.^[2] Mill broke is paper trimmings and other paper scraps from the manufacture of paper, and is recycled in a paper mill. Pre-consumer waste is a material which left the paper mill but was discarded before it was ready for consumer use. Post-consumer waste is discarded after consumer use, such as old corrugated containers (OCC), magazines, and newspapers.^[2] Paper suitable for recycling is called "scrap paper", often used and iso produces moulded pulp packaging. The industrial process of removing printing ink from paper fibres of recycled paper to make deinked pulp is called deinking, an invention of the German jurist Justus Claproth.^[3]