Making Sense Of Recycled Paper

Traditionally, paper manufacturers only produced virgin fiber paper products — products manufactured from harvested raw materials. But because of the high cost to manufacture these products — virgin fiber requires significant energy for harvesting, pulping and processing — and the political context behind the process, paper manufacturers have begun shifting their efforts towards products and processes that are more sustainable.

Even though most end users enjoy the softness and the high quality that is associated with virgin fiber towel and tissue products, jan/san distributors say the commercial market for the most part is not seeking out these traditional products like in years past. The trend nowadays is to purchase paper products manufactured with recycled content, says Teresa Farmer, green program specialist with Kelsan Inc., Knoxville, Tenn.

“Some of the high-end hotels and resorts may still be looking at virgin paper products, but a lot of customers are going to the recycled content,” she says.

Once considered to be low quality and cost more, recycled paper products are now up to par with their traditional counterparts — quality-wise and price-wise, says David Renard, president of Renard Paper Co., Inc., St. Louis. But some customers still need a little convincing that recycled fiber is comparable to virgin fiber paper products.

“Usually, once we give customers a sample of the recycled fiber and they can actually touch it and feel it, then that changes their minds,” says Farmer. “I think people still have the perception that these products only come in a brown roll towel or come as rough toilet paper. That isn’t the case anymore.”

Advanced technology and education on the part of manufacturers has helped to make recycled paper products more efficient and cost effective. Thus, customers no longer have to compromise quality or cost anymore to do the environmentally sound thing, says Bill McGarvey, director of training and sustainability for Philip Rosenau Co., Warminster, Pa.

It’s up to distributors, however, to help customers understand the environmental benefits between using a recycled fiber paper vs. a virgin fiber paper product — and sort through the terminology that is associated with many eco-friendly paper products today.

Recycled Fibers

Customers often misunderstand where recycled towel and tissue products come from, distributors say. Today’s recycled fiber paper products can be broken down into two categories — recovered fiber and post consumer waste material.

Recovered fiber is generated after the completion of the paper making process, such as post-consumer materials, envelope cuttings, bindery trimmings, printing waste, butt rolls and mill wrappers, obsolete inventories and rejected unused stock.

Post consumer waste materials on the other hand, are finished products that went out into the world and have served that purpose, and then were recovered from or otherwise diverted from the waste stream for the purpose of recycling, says McGarvey.

Today, because of their sustainable claims, recycled fiber products are viewed as a necessary offering across the board.

“Everybody’s got to have a green story to tell and the availability of recycled fiber is greater now than it has ever been,” says McGarvey.

Acceptance has not been a problem either. In fact, when customers are given the option of purchasing a paper product that is either virgin fiber or is recycled, they will more than often choose the recycled paper, says Farmer.

Recycled paper products are now being used in restrooms of office buildings, hotels and restaurants that are looking to go green or achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“The knock against the traditional recycled content was that it wasn’t good enough for Class A offices,” says McGarvey. “That’s not the case anymore as the manufacturers have really stepped up over the past few years with greener offerings.”

In fact, in most instances customers can’t tell the difference between products with recycled content and those that are virgin fiber anymore, says Farmer.

“Now you can get recycled paper in white roll towels and the paper just seems to be thicker. You can also get two-ply bathroom tissue and it’s just a softer product,” she says.

Green Certification

With customers looking to become better environmental stewards, paper manufacturers are making it easier to meet those goals. In fact, distributors are ushering customers looking to go green towards paper products that are certified by third-party organizations such as Green Seal and EcoLogo, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Chlorine Free Products Association (CFPA) and the Green Restaurants Association.

These organizations have put these paper products through strict testing, so distributors are ensured that they are selling customers the greenest paper products available. And, by taking the guesswork out of the equation, it also substantiates a facility’s claim that they’re in fact using a green paper product, says Farmer.

Simply because a product uses recycled fiber does not automatically mean that the product is green. It needs to be produced using a specific percentage of post-consumer content and recovered fibers.

In its Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines for Commercial/Industrial Sanitary Tissue Products, the EPA recommends a minimum of 40 percent post-consumer waste content be used in the manufacturing of towels and a minimum of 20 percent for restroom tissue. For a restroom tissue to be certified by Green Seal, the fiber in the product must contain 100 percent recovered materials, including 20 percent post-consumer materials.

Environmentally friendly paper also isn’t bleached using chlorine derivatives. According to the Chlorine Free Products Association, for a recycled content paper product to be certified as “Processed Chlorine Free” it must include all recycled fibers used as a feedstock that meet EPA guidelines for recycled or post-consumer content. Processed Chlorine Free paper has not been rebleached with chlorine containing compounds and a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer content is required.

Green Seal and EcoLogo standards also mandate that towels and tissue cannot be bleached with chlorine or any of its derivatives such as hypochlorite or chlorine dioxide.

Some paper manufacturers claim their towel and tissue products are bleached using an elemental chlorine process — a process thought to be eco-friendly. However, elemental chlorine free differs from processed chlorine free because elemental chlorine free paper products are bleached with a chlorine compound — most often chlorine dioxide, which releases dioxins into the environment. With processed chlorine free, however, both recycled fiber and any virgin fiber used is bleached without chlorine or chlorine derivitatives.

Since most product packaging ends up in the waste stream, how the product is packaged is also a significant component to whether a paper product is considered green. In fact, most third-party organizations mandate that the cores in roll towels and restroom tissue be made from 100 percent recycled materials.

The manufacturing process is also taken into consideration when determining if a product is truly sustainable. EcoLogo, for instance, requires those paper products that have to be manufactured using virgin fiber, to only use fiber harvested under sustainable forest practices.

Paper by-products from manufacturers often end up paving roads, making grass grow or providing a strong foundation for highways. Paper mills use ash from power boilers for road stabilization and building, and farmers and turf growers are benefiting from waste that is turned into fertilizers or grass seed.

On top of purchasing products that are green certified, eco-conscious end users are also concerned about reducing the amount of paper being used — and wasted — in their facilities.

Waste Reduction

For years, the unnecessary disposal of unused tisue from public restrooms has been a major problem. To offset this costly problem for facilities, paper manufacturers introduced a greener product offering — coreless restroom tissue.

“By going coreless, what they’ve done is they made that roll of toilet paper a complete roll,” says McGarvey. “There’s no center to it — it’s not a hollow roll center, so you have a little more paper per roll.”

A major advantage to using coreless tissue is the fact that it reduces waste — there are no wrappers, no cores and fewer stub rolls to discard, says Farmer.

“When people service restrooms, if there’s a stub roll, they’ll pull that off and put on a fresh new roll,” she says. “And at the end of the day, it’s amazing how many stub rolls there are. And so, if they can use every bit of that paper, it saves them a lot of money.”

Even more than toilet tissue, hand towels are a major source of waste and headaches for facilities.

Roll towels are generally preferred over multi-fold towels, but because multi-fold towels are cheaper, more facilities tend to stock these in their restrooms, distributors say.

Even though roll towels may cost more, there’s usually less waste because multi-fold towels tend to fall out, or users pull more out than they need. By getting customers to switch to roll towels dispensed in touchfree dispensers, distributors say facilities are recognizing savings in labor and product usage.

“It’s usually about 25 to 30 percent savings over the multi-fold towels,” says Farmer. “Plus, they don’t have the mess when somebody comes in and they pull one towel out and 10 fall to the floor. A multi-fold towel is going to be cheaper than a roll towel, but when they stop and look at the long-term return on investment, that’s when they start to see.”

Each customer has their own preference of what towel and tissue products they want in their restrooms. However, helping them sort through the terminology may help them find the best fit for their facility and the environment.