Sorting
Successful recycling requires clean recovered paper, so you must keep your paper free from contaminants, such as food, plastic, metal, and other trash, which make paper difficult to recycle. Contaminated paper which cannot be recycled must be composted, burned for energy, or landfilled.

Recycling centers usually ask that you sort your paper by grade, or type of paper. Your local recycling center can tell you how to sort paper for recycling in your community. To locate your nearest dealer, look in the yellow pages of your phone book under "waste paper" or "recycling."

Collection and Transportation
You may take your sorted paper to a local recycling center or recycling bin. Often, a paper stock dealer or recycling center will collect recovered paper from your home or office. Your local dealer can tell you the options available in your community.

At the recycling center, the collected paper is wrapped in tight bales and transported to a paper mill, where it will be recycled into new paper.

 

Storage
Paper mill workers unload the recovered paper and put it into warehouses, where it is stored until needed. The various paper grades, such as newspapers and corrugated boxes, are kept separate, because the paper mill uses different grades of recovered paper to make different types of recycled paper products.

When the paper mill is ready to use the paper, forklifts move the paper from the warehouse to large conveyors.

 

Re-pulping and Screening
The paper moves by conveyor to a big vat called a pulper, which contains water and chemicals. The pulper chops the recovered paper into small pieces. Heating the mixture breaks the paper down more quickly into tiny strands of cellulose
(organic plant material) called fibers. Eventually, the old paper turns into a mushy mixture called pulp.

The pulp is forced through screens containing holes and slots of various shapes and sizes. The screens remove small contaminants such as bits of plastic and globs of glue. This process is called screening.

 

Cleaning
Mills also clean pulp by spinning it around in large cone-shaped cylinders. Heavy contaminants like staples are thrown to the outside of the cone and fall through the bottom of the cylinder. Lighter contaminants collect in the center of the cone and are removed. This process is called cleaning.

 

Refining, Bleaching and Color Stripping During refining, the pulp is beaten to make the recycled fibers swell, making them ideal for papermaking. If the pulp contains any large bundles of fibers, refining separates them into individual fibers. If the recovered paper is colored, color stripping chemicals remove the dyes from the paper. Then, if white recycled paper is being made, the pulp may need to be bleached with hydrogen peroxide, chlorine dioxide, or oxygen to make it whiter and brighter. If brown recycled paper is being made, such as that used for industrial paper towels, the pulp does not need to be bleached.

Papermaking (cont.) The sheet, which now resembles paper, passes through a series of heated metal rollers which dry the paper. If coated paper is being made, a coating mixture can be applied near the end of the process, or in a separate process after the papermaking is completed. coating gives paper a smooth, glossy surface for printing.

Papermaking (cont.) Finally, the finished paper is wound into a giant roll and removed from the paper machine. One roll can be as wide as 30 feet and weigh as much as 20 tons! The roll of paper is cut into smaller rolls, or sometimes into sheets, before being shipped to a converting plant where it will be printed or made into products such as envelopes, paper bags, or boxes.

Can all of my recovered paper be recycled?

As much as 80% of the content of typical recovered paper can actually be used in the recycling process, but 20% cannot. A lot of what's contained in a bale of recovered "paper" isn't paper! Trash, such as wire, staples, paper clips, and plastic, must be removed during pulping, cleaning, and screening. This trash is usually sent to a landfill, just like your trash at home.

Recovered paper contains some fibers which have become too small to be recycled into paper. Your recovered paper may contain fibers which already have been recycled one, twice, or perhaps several times! Wood fibers can only be recycled five to seven times before they become too short and brittle to be made into new paper.

Recovered paper contains many other ingredients which are not paper fibers. Just take a look at a magazine and you'll see what we mean. The printed pages contain lots of ink. If the pages are shiny, that portably means they are coated with clay or other materials. Magazines also contain adhesives which bind the pages together. Ink, coatings, and adhesives must be removed from the paper before recycled paper can be produced.