Acceptable VS. Unacceptable
Acceptable
Unacceptable
What's Black and White and Read all Over and Over and Over?
Paper and Cardboard Recycling
By Whitney Chandler
Recently I toured Waste Management's Material Recovery Facility or M.R.F. (pronounced "Murf"), where I learned just how easy it is for a newspaper to become a newspaper again. Steamboat's Waste Management team takes massive amounts of paper and cardboard from residential pick-ups, offices and other large companies, bundles it in large quantities and ships it off to one of the three major mills in the United States—or ships it off to China—where it is mulched, pulped and pressed into new paper, toilet paper or even soup can wrappers. Since the late 1980s, most office paper has been made with some part recycled paper pulp. By 1993, more paper was recycled than put into landfills, making it possible for many brands to profit by producing their products with 100% recycled paper.
Cardboard is the first item sorted from single-stream recycling and it undergoes more processing than office paper. There are two different types: paperboard (cereal, rice and shoe box type) and corrugated cardboard (packing and pizza boxes). Paperboard is made from a mix of recycled paper and recycled cardboard. The grayish color most of these boxes have is from the ink left over on the recycled paper. There is not much need for durability with this product and it can be recycled multiple times to produce the same product with very little virgin material (trees or wood chips). Corrugated cardboard is made from milled paper and recycled cardboard and is often blended with virgin wood chips to produce a more heavy-duty cardboard. Manufacturers can request higher durability levels as needed.
But think twice before assuming ALL paper can be thrown into the recycle bin. The bright neon paper used to make flashy flyers is not as acceptable as your newspaper. The dyes added to fluorescent, neon, Astrobrite® and dark-colored paper are beaten into the paper so the dye covers all parts of the pulp, making it harder to extract the color and reducing its ability to be recycled into new usable paper. If the dye has been beaten in and inked all the way through, that paper is recycled into shoe boxes or other similar low-grade products. Some dyed papers can be recycled and are acceptable because the dye is only applied to the outer layers of a sheet. To tell the difference, tear off a small corner of the paper; if there are white fibers on the inside of the paper, it is acceptable. Paper that has not had dye beaten into it is more easily added to the recycling process, something to consider when purchasing paper products. 
With its ever growing population and ever expanding export market, China has an increasing need for paper. Last year China bought eleven million of the fifty million tons of paper the US recycled. With the sales of recycled paper booming in the past eight to nine years, the price of recycled paper is now competitive with that of virgin paper. China is jumping on the bandwagon, using recycled paper to package its many exported products, and saving fifty-four million tons of wood from being harvested for pulp. Because China has a history of buying timber for paper production from countries that use illegal harvesting techniques (such as Indonesia and Eastern Russia) it is even better that China is turning from using virgin material to producing their paper and paperboard.
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