Sat 22 Mar 2008
When I first started recycling in the 1980s it took some effort to find a place that would accept office paper. Lots of people recycled cans, since you got money back, and a few people would take in glass bottles, but that was about it. You couldn’t recycle plastic anywhere.
When I buy office products, I always try to buy paper products that have the highest recycled content I can find. Initially, I couldn’t find anything that had recycled paper in it at all, but over the years recycled paper products have become more and more available, and in steadily higher percentages of recycled content. The problem is that they are usually more expensive, and sometimes way more expensive.
On a recent trip to Staples for office paper, not only did I find 100% recycled paper (100%!), but it was actually cheaper than the other stuff. That is so great. I honestly never thought I would see this happen. Sometimes you have to look at the little things in order to see progress, but I would say that this is actually huge.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Here is a weird fact for you. Most paper is at least 10% recycled content or more, plus it probably has as much as 50% post industrial paper (also recycled) much more, but it is not declared because it’s not a fixed content.
If you declare paper to be 10% post consumer waste, it must be. No more and no less, and you need to have a (forgive me) paper trail to prove this. It’s expensive to make sure something is exactly anything.
the 100% recycled might be cheaper just because they don’t have to track anything, and notice, it says nothing about post consumer waste. The stuff that is not consumer waste will get recycled for sure. These are end rolls, scraps from die cutting, left overs mostly. Easy to get from the people who create them. The problem is the recovery of post consumer waste and getting it back into the paper stream since it’s of a random quality, not pre-sorted by type.
Newspaper: hard to recycle. Cardboard: easier to. Blank paper from the end of a roll: Simple.
-GReg