Paper: Can We Really Claim It's "Green" to Recycle?
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Many years ago before I joined the illustrious ranks of the Commercial Records Managers I attended university in London and Amsterdam where I studied and later worked as an environmentalist. It was while in the Netherlands that I laid claim to the fact that at university I was studying "grass" for a year. However it was not the type of grass that is normally found being stuffed into a Dutchman's pipe or rolled into a cigarette by a tourist. It was the every day type of grass which your average Friesian cow enjoys. Apart from my foray into the world of grasses my main area of study was trees, in particular habitat and forestry management. Once I figured out I wasn’t going to make a living looking at trees all day, I moved on to the other end of the spectrum where I now work in storing and managing one of the products of these trees.
Recycling might be the buzz word of the moment, but is all recycling good for the environment? Sure, it's helpful to recycle many things, but not all things benefit the environment when recycled. The obvious one is glass. Back in the 1990s everyone the world over was recycling glass and "bottle banks" could be found on every street corner and supermarket car-park for you to deposit your empty bottles. That was until someone realized that glass is just powdered limestone, sand and sodium carbonate that will naturally degrade overtime, and that it takes about 1/3 as much energy to make recycled glass as it does to produce the stuff from its raw constituents.
I now work for a large international commercial records management company that currently has locations in 52 countries. When it comes to paper we have reams of the stuff—over 20 million cubic feet of it—beautifully boxed up and lining shelves in ideal storage conditions all over the world. I worked out once that if I employed one person to glance at every piece of paper we had in storage for less than two seconds, working an eight hour shift, five days per week, with three week's holiday per year, it would take this person approximately 6,744 years to complete the task. Working from 250 locations and averaging 130,000 air miles per year, I have plenty of time to ponder such statistics.
Like everyone else working in the records management industry, our clients, in their own efforts to be good green citizens, come to us and ask us to securely destroy some of this paper we manage for them. Many of them even ask us to place purpose-made receptacles on their premises, so they can store their paper until we come to collect it, take it away and destroy it, or “recycle it.” The main concern of the client is to ensure what ever document or record we destroy is done securely so that its contents are eradicated and will never see the light of day again. On another long flight I also calculated that globally, just within the company I work for, we securely destroy 130,844 times my body weight (a slight 115 kgs) every year.
It was while at a PRISM conference in Daytona Beach, Florida, earlier this year, that I attended a very good session on green issues and heard someone say recycling paper after secure destruction is good for the environment and we should be promoting this to our clients. This got me thinking: Is recycling paper in fact good for the environment? Paper is of course a commodity and shredded paper has a value. There are paper mills all over the world and regions of Asia are willing to pay cold cash for the product. But on the long flight back from Florida to Hong Kong, I pondered the premise even more and wondered if recycling paper is good for the environment and something we can and should claim as a "green" activity.
A few of the things I pondered while contemplating the benefits of recycling paper:
• Paper is made of a renewable source. By this I mean if we cut down a tree and make paper from it, you can grow another tree. Not all paper is wood pulp based but it does all come from renewable sources.
• Most trees used in the manufacture of paper are specifically grown for that purpose. The figure varies, but from a little research on the internet it seems that at least 90 percent comes from purpose-grown trees. Loss of trees and habitats in our rain forests are not generally attributed to the manufacture of paper. However large plantations of trees for paper manufacture can still have a negative impact on the environment. Many of the plantations are made up of trees which are not "natives" to the environment in which they are grown, and that causes a detrimental effect to the local habits.
• Paper products are biodegradable. Apart from perhaps some ink products which may have a toxic effect and the metal or plastic clips that accompany some documents, if you stick paper in a hole in the ground it will naturally decompose into an inert organic material.
• When paper is recycled it takes a lot of energy, water and chemicals. Much like glass, recycling paper takes more energy and produces more pollutants than manufacturing paper from new. However due to the demand of paper and paper products it is still commercially viable to do so. The unfortunate reality is that many paper mills are situated in regions and countries where environmental concerns are not always top priority.
We do need to securely destroy documents and that is one of the services we provide as an industry, but when we send the product off to the paper mills for pulping and recycling, we need to be very careful about making claims that this is good for the environment.
Ultimately (and I am speaking here as one who cares about trees and habitats), what would truly benefit the planet would be a reduction in paper overall. Something that we are trying is the promotion of e-billing, Web ordering and e-receipts for all of our activities. If I converted all my clients to e-billing, that would save approximately 12 trees per month (or one small woodland each year) given that an average tree produces 9,000 sheets of paper. If as an industry we all work together we can save many hundreds of thousands of reams of paper. I believe that this is an even more important message and one that we should be promoting to our clients.
About the Author
Philip Britton Group Vice President of Records Management Crown Records Management E-mail: pbritton@crownrms.com
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