Issue 2 2009 > Paper. Can We Really Claim It’s "Green" to Recycle?
Paper. Can We Really Claim It’s "Green" to Recycle?
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 whilst in the Netherlands that I laid claim to the fact that at university I was studying "grass" for a year. 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 had figured out that 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 may be the buzz word of the moment, but is all recycling good for the environment?
Sure, there are many things that are very important to recycle but not all things benefit the environment from being recycled. The obvious one is glass. Back in the 1990’s every one was recycling glass the world over and "bottle banks" could be found on every street corner and supermarket car-park for us to deposit our 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 am working at Crown Records Management with locations in 55 countries. When it comes to paper we have reams of the stuff, over 20 million cubic feet of it, beautifully boxed and lined up on shelving, stored in ideal 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 weeks 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 who works 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 whatever 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 or 254 pounds) every year.
It was whilst at the PRISM conference held in Daytona Beach, Florida earlier this year where I attended a very good session on green issues, I heard someone say that recycling paper after secure destruction is good for the environment and that we should be promoting this to our clients. This got me thinking. Is in fact recycling paper 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 hard 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 being a "green" activity.
A few of the things I pondered on whilst contemplating the benefits of recycling paper:
In conjunction with World Environment Day, the team at
Crown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia dedicated an entire week
to the environment. Each department planted a tree
in the front lawn of the facility.
- 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% 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 still have a negative impact. Many of the plantations are made up of trees which are not "natives" to the environment in which they are grown, which does cause a detrimental effect to the local habitats.
- Paper products are bio degradable. 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 uses up 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 a top priority.
We do need to securely destroy documents and records 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, this 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.
Written by:
Philip Britton
Group Vice President of
Crown Records Management
Email: pbritton@crownworldwide.com