The wastes which come from “deinking” recycled paper.

Renewable fibres = lower carbon footprint

We often get asked why we don’t use recycled paper to make our tissue products.

One reason is that the cleaning and deinking of recycled paper necessary to make soft hygienic tissue requires large amounts of chemicals, water and heat and creates landfill waste. The quality and purity of recycled fibres is also an issue.

Now we have new data that gives even more weight to our argument for renewable sources of fibre or pulp. This data reveals that making tissue from renewable sources, such as wood thinnings, creates less greenhouse emissions than using recycled paper.

This chart [popup window, 90kB, GIF image] shows greenhouse emissions for typical tissue production using pulp (fibre) produced at a chemical pulp mill. This is typical for most quality tissue products. The data for the three sequences of production are compared with recycled tissue production.

Stage A

At Stage A, collecting and delivering recycled paper to a mill uses more fossil fuel and creates more greenhouse emissions than all aspects of planting, growing, harvesting and delivering renewable wood.

Stage B

In Stage B, renewable fibre creates less emissions because the energy required to make pulp from wood in chemical pulp mills comes from the wood itself. It is renewable and greenhouse neutral. But deinking recycled paper and cleaning it into usable fibre uses a lot of heat and fossil fuels which means high greenhouse emissions.

For Kimberly-Clark Australia, the emissions at Stage B are higher on average than shown in the chart because some products include some thermo-mechanical pulp (TMP). TMP doesn’t have the same greenhouse-neutral advantages as chemical or Kraft pulp [Wikipedia], so our emissions in B are higher, but in total are still less than recycled tissue products.

Stage C

Stage C is the actual tissue making process. This is the main energy user as the pulp in the wet sheet has to be dried to make tissue. However, recycled fibres make the wet sheet more gloopy. So they take more energy to process and dry to make tissue than new fibres from a chemical pulp mill.

Total carbon dioxide

The total greenhouse emissions are greater in most cases when making recycled tissue products than when making tissue with renewable fibres from chemical pulp mills.