PAPER RECYCLING:
Keeping a Valuable
Resource Out of Landfills
One of the principal reasons why the paper
industry set its original 40 percent paper
recovery goal was to reduce the amount of
paper going into America’s landfills. With
existing landfill space filling up and newlandfills increasingly difficult to site, it
became imperative that manufacturers and
consumers work together to reduce the
amount of materials destined for disposal.
What‘s more, because recovered paper is
such a valuable resource, increasing
recovery made perfect sense for America’s
papermakers.Largely as a result of this commitment to
increase paper recovery, there have been- and will continue to be - significant
changes in the way used paper is managed.
Consider these facts:
1 Even though paper consumption has
increased, significantly less paper is going
to landfills - 11 million fewer tons in 1993
than in 1987.
In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more
than 90 million cubic yards of landfill space.
In 1993, for the first time in history,
more paper was recovered in the United
States than was landfilled.
When the 50 percent goal is achieved,
twice as much paper will be recovered as
landfilled.THE 50 PERCENT GOAL.
How Will We Achieve Ii
America’s papermakers have set an
ambitious goal - recovering 50 percent of
all the paper Americans use in the year- But just as public-private cooperation
was the key to achieving the 40 percent
target ahead of schedule, so will it be the
key to achieving the new 50 percent goal.
Specifically, four things must happen:
1. Paper recovery programs must continue
io grow. We’ve seen extraordinary growth
in paper recovery programs at the local level- and equally extraordinary participation
in them by millions of environmentally
conscious Americans. Looking ahead, it is
vitally important to realize that different
types of recovered paper are suitable for
recycling into different types of paper and
paperboard products. The point is that all
recovered paper is not the same. Continued
growth in paper recovery programs -
focused on recovery of source-separated
grades of paper in demand by recyclers -
is essential.Tissue li%l
- US. paper manufacfurers must
make unprecedented investments in
new recycling capacity. U.S. paper
manufacturers need to continue to expand
their recycling capacity in order to provide
AMERICAN FOREST (I PAPER ASSOCIATION iii