Ecology

Carlo Braulio Reyes Escandon

How to recycle paper?

Paper recycling is the process of turning waste paper into new paper products. There are three categories of paper that can be used asfeedstocks for making recycled paper: mill broke, pre-consumer waste, and post-consumer waste.[1] Mill broke is paper trimmings and other paper scrap from the manufacture of paper, and is recycled internallyin a paper mill. Pre-consumer waste is material which left the paper mill but was discarded before it was ready for consumer use. Post-consumer waste is material discarded after consumer use, such asold corrugated containers (OCC), old magazines, old newspapers (ONP), office paper, old telephone directories, and residential mixed paper (RMP).[2] Paper suitable for recycling is called "scrappaper", often used to produce molded pulp packaging. The industrial process of removing printing ink from paperfibers of recycled paper to make deinked pulp is called deinking, an invention of the Germanjurist Justus Claproth.
Rationale for recycling
Industrialized paper making has an effect on the environment both upstream (where raw materials are acquired and processed) and downstream(waste-disposal impacts).
Today, 90% of paper pulp is made of wood. Paper production accounts for about 35% of felled trees, and represents 1.2% of the world's total economic output. Recycling one ton ofnewsprint saves about 1 ton of wood while recycling 1 ton of printing or copier paper saves slightly more than 2 tons of wood. This is because kraft pulping requires twice as much wood since it removeslignin to produce higher quality fibres than mechanical pulping processes. Relating tons of paper recycled to the number of trees not cut is meaningless, since tree size varies tremendously and is themajor factor in how much paper can be made from how many trees. Trees raised specifically for pulp production account for 16% of world pulp production, old growth forests 9% and second- and third- and...