Having spent too many years working for a large commercial printer (magazines and advertising material) let me give you a few facts regarding printing paper. First off, most (I won't say all, I just don't know) forests used for paper, especially commercial printing, comes from purpose grown sustainable trees. Norway and Canada are large paper manufacturers and they use trees grown for that express purpose. These are grown using rotating land. Each area is single type trees, as each is harvested new seedlings are planted. By the time the company gets back to that particular plot those seedlings are mature trees ready to harvest. Often times the land used had no trees to begin with, so these trees represent an increase in the amount of forest. If this were stopped then those lands would go wild and the number of trees would actually decline.

Recycled paper is not of a quality useable for paper products. Our plant very carefully seperated our production waste which was graded by quality and sold to paper manufacturers. Only the best grade, unprinted trimmings and end rolls was of a quality usable for paper production. All other waste was used only for cardboard production. In addition, the customers would not accept recycled paper for their product.

Recycled paper only makes up a small percentage of paper content. I would say 2-4% post consumer waste. Even that little bit degraded the quality of the paper significantly. In order to bring the quality up to minimum standards it had to be treated with chemicals that are both expensive and not environmentally-friendly. What you the consumer might accept in your "green" cards and notepaper you will not accept when used for magazine production. We printed magazines such as Life, Rolling Stone, Wine Journal, and Men's Health, to name a few. All of these experimented with using recycled paper instead of first growth trees and without exception the subscriber response was negative. As new grades and types of recycled paper became available these tests would be rerun. The reaction was uniformally negative.

Recycled paper doesn't work well when printing photographs, not the quality of photos used in magazine production. Our presses were state of the art and if we could have reproduced photographs at an acceptable quality using recycled paper it would have been used. Recycled paper was also a problem when run on high speed presses. At 20,000 impressions a minute breakage became a significant factor. Modern printing and binding operation requires those speeds to be profitable. If 20-30% of your production time was spent down due to paper breakage you are losing money, bleeding money would not be an exaggeration.

One area where recycled paper is used frequently is in the newspaper insert/advertising flyers. These do not require the quality of reproduction that magazines do. We printed material for WalMart, CVS, Bass Pro shops, Pennys, and others and all used recycled paper at least part of the time.

So, when you get down to it, recycled paper is really only suitable for the production of various grades of cardboard. This may change in the future as new production techniques are developed, but I would hesitate to make a guess at when that might occurr.