 |
|
By Sara Philips, Ecology Center recycling assistant
November 2007
There is something to be said for less consumption, in the grand scheme of things.
I am often reminded of a cartoon on recycling I saw a few years ago, wherein you see two neighbors putting out their materials on garbage morning. The first fellow is putting out bin after bin, and has quite an array of materials at his curb. But the second has just a single bin of bottles/cans, and then a small single bag of mixed paper. Maybe we can guess what they say to one another.
Neighbor one declares, “We help the environment by consuming lots of recyclable materials!” And neighbor two states, “We help the environment by consuming less.”
When I ready my materials for recycling pickup, I’m often reminded of the above. Junk mail (which includes catalogs about once in a blue moon now, as opposed to once a month) is the worst culprit at this point; followed closely by a couple magazine subscriptions I am in the process of extricating myself from. I don’t subscribe to newspapers, but a recent survey of news options on the internet revealed a world of free online subscriptions to major newspapers, magazines, and online journals in general, not to mention the infinite universe of blogs. We are certainly not lacking for news sources.
So I would like to address the issues of newspapers and newsprint recycling, primarily, as there’s a sly irony to living and working in a city of extremely astute and environmentally minded folk, many of whom subscribe to multiple newspapers.
Did you know that newsprint is recycled and reprocessed into subsequent newsprint and other papers a finite number of times? (This is true of all paper stocks). As the paper fibers become shorter with each generation, they go on to the manufacture of paperboard (e.g. egg cartons, cereal boxes), which is sort of their last hurrah before they are made into tissue products, which are not reclaimed. For more information on newsprint grading and types than you can shake a stick at, visit Conservatree.org’s page on newsprint. And did you know that newspapers are not 100% recycled content?
As it happens, we’re somewhere around 10% recycled content in newspapers, which is to say that the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle which landed in your rose bushes this morning probably contains only 10% post-consumer paper. That leaves quite a bit to the imagination. As well, no one seems keen on tracking just how much post-consumer newsprint is being used in newsprint, over all. Perhaps we can thank watering down of established requirements, and then watering down of reporting guidelines. I contacted the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle to inquire as to post-consumer content averages, hoping to find it is higher than the 10% I was able to glean from the folks at Conservatree.org. At the time of this piece, only the NY Times had gotten back to me, stating that the paper they use ranges from 21 to 28% recycled content. The ambiguity of that statement is that they consider waste paper from their plants to be recycled content, which obfuscates the question as to whether it is post-consumer fiber or not (and they didn’t answer my question on post-consumer fiber). From the Conservatree.org site:
“…There is some discrepancy in the meaning of "recycled content" in newspapers. In its 1988 Comprehensive Purchasing Guidelines for federal agency purchasing, EPA required a minimum of 40% postconsumer fiber in newsprint, consistent with the requirements of several of the states pushing recycled newsprint laws or agreements at the time. But in its 1995 revisions to the paper purchasing requirements, EPA dropped its minimum for newsprint to 20%. The reason, EPA staff said, was because surveys of paper manufacturers indicated that the actual amount of postconsumer they were using averaged only 20%, with the rest of the recycled content made up of preconsumer printing and converting scraps.
California had encouraged some of the confusion when it passed its mandatory law requiring newsprint purchasers within the state to buy recycled newsprint with steadily increasing amounts of postconsumer, but defined the term "postconsumer" differently in that legislation than anywhere else. All other "postconsumer" references in California law were consistent with the then-coalescing nationwide agreement on a definition limiting "postconsumer" to materials that had been discarded by an end-user. But California's newsprint law defined postconsumer as also including printers' scraps, despite their categorization as preconsumer under all other definitions. Our conversations with newsprint mill representatives indicate that they are now, in fact, not tracking postconsumer content at all. Instead, they report their recycled fiber use by the paperstock scrap categories specified by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI)….”
In a nutshell, those newspapers aren’t coming back 100% as new newspapers on a daily basis. A percentage of the reclaimed newsprint is coming back, with the remainder constituting pre-consumer fiber of varying types. They are however coming back as paperboard products like cartons and food boxes, but paperboard has a very limited life. And remember, the newsprint that comes from single-stream recycling programs (thankfully, we are still separating the paper from the glass in Berkeley) is even less likely to be partly reincarnated as subsequent newspapers.
‘So what’s a savvy recycler to do?’ you might well be asking.
How about online magazine and newspaper subscriptions, for starters. I ran some calculations to figure out how much I save on a yearly basis, reading newspapers with all their archives and updates online, versus what I’d shell out if I subscribed to print editions. Let’s say I were to subscribe to the Times and Chron… that would be $737.00 annually for both. Now, if I access them online (using dialup access at home), that’s $143.40 annually, because I’m just paying my monthly $11.95 for internet access. By all means, consider the dollars and cents angle.
Then there’s the tree standpoint of course, so here are some figures to ponder:
It remains that we could still do better with newspaper.
Share a paper with your neighbor? Take your paper to work and share it around the office? Read it online? A few of our recycling drivers read the paper the next day and then recycle it, which is a simple task given that last month roughly 287.1 tons of newspapers were picked up by our residential curbside program. That’s just one program of three, recycling newspapers in Berkeley. The city’s commercial recycling fleet brings in newspapers, and the public drops off newspapers for recycling at the Community Conservation Center located at Gilman, as well.
So, 287.1 tons of newspaper (it should be noted, we also picked up 206.57 tons of corrugated cardboard, and 187.43 tons of mixed paper)… That newspaper represents 4,880.7 trees saved last month, ostensibly. And 1,996,206.3 gallons of water. And 132,927.3 gallons of oil, 168,527.7 pounds of air pollution spared, 878.526 cubic yards of landfill space, 1,170,506.7 kilowatt hours of energy.
Just imagine how many trees would be saved, how much water and oil and electricity, if fewer newspapers were consumed in the first place. A year’s worth of New York Times Sunday editions? Roughly 3,900,000 trees.
Another good idea: CatalogChoice, a fiscally sponsored project of the Ecology Center, can help you substantially reduce the amount of paper waste you generate by putting a stop to the unwanted catalogs you receive. The project was featured in a recent article in the New York Times, and in less than two weeks, over 37,000 people signed up for the free service, opting out of 150,000 catalog titles. Its easy and free to use the service, you can sign up online. The project is a great fit with the Ecology Center and came to us because of our commitment to Zero Waste.
Some basic information to motivate you to extricate yourself from catalog mailing lists:
For other junk mail such as credit card offers, coupons, Publisher’s Clearinghouse, et al, the StopJunkMail.org website has good advice and strategies for eliminating this material from your mailbox. As of 2006, Stopwaste.org cited that junk mail represents 5% of what Alameda County residents send to landfills, so every little bit helps in terms of eliminating it from our mailboxes to begin with.
Reuse, reduce, refuse, and recycle!