The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [49]
Chemical pulping, the more widespread process, takes chemicals, heat, and pressure to separate the fibers. More chemicals are used later in the process as dyes, inks, bleach, sizing, and coatings. “The art of modern papermaking lies in the specialty chemicals used,” explained one chemical journalist. “Like spices for food, they give the paper that certain something.”41 And as paper use goes up, so does demand for those chemicals used in production. In the United States, the demand for chemicals for pulp and paper production is projected to reach 20 billion tons in 2011, with the chemicals valued at $8.8 billion.42
The most notorious and controversial chemical used in papermaking is chlorine, which is added to help with the pulping and also to bleach the paper. By itself, chlorine is a powerful toxin—so toxic that it was used as a weapon in the First World War. But when chlorine gets mixed with organic compounds (those that contain carbon)—which, in a slush made of mashed plants, happens a lot—the chlorine bonds with them to create nearly a thousand different organochlorines, including the most toxic persistent pollutant in existence, dioxin.43 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have both confirmed that dioxin causes cancer.44 It’s also linked to endocrine, reproductive, nervous, and immune system damage45—which really don’t seem worth it for having white paper. Me, I’d take slightly brown—or tree colored—paper over carcinogens any day.
In Europe, much of the paper—from toilet paper to book pages—is off-white in color. Many of their paper mills have switched to totally chlorine free (TCF) processes, using oxygen or ozone and hydrogen peroxide instead of chlorine to bleach paper.46 In the United States and Canada, many of our mills prefer elemental chlorine free (ECF) processing, which replaces chlorine gas with chlorine derivatives, such as chlorine dioxide. True, this beats dousing our paper with chlorine gas, and it reduces dioxin formation by about half. But any amount of dioxins is too much, even a speck. So TCF is definitely preferable. There is one last variation on the chlorine front: processed chlorine free (PCF) refers to paper made from recycled paper sources. This means the mill can’t guarantee that no chorine was used in the original paper production but promises that no chlorine was used in the recycling process.
Getting rid of chlorine requires some investment, but is a small price to pay compared to all those costs that get externalized onto the environment and people, such as the dioxin discharged into rivers that threatens fishing grounds, livelihoods, and community health.
One of the other toxins involved in papermaking is mercury, the potent neurotoxin that harms the nervous system and brain, especially in fetuses and children. Mercury has a backstage presence in papermaking, “upstream” at so-called chlor-alkali plants where chlorine and caustic soda (lye) are produced. The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of caustic soda worldwide.47 Even though competitive, cost-effective, nonmercury alternatives exist to making chlorine and caustic soda, a number of chlor-alkali plants in the United States and the rest of the world still use mercury in their manufacturing. And once it’s been released into the environment, mercury doesn’t go away.
However, things are looking up: there has been enough sustained concern about mercury (see the section “Dangerous Materials” later in this chapter) that these plants are increasingly becoming a relic of the past, gradually being replaced with mercury-free alternatives.
So, back to the paper mill. Once the pulping process is finished, the pulp is mixed with water and sprayed onto a moving mesh screen. These screens get vacuumed, heated, and pressed to get them to dry into a consistent paper product—all processes that consume energy. Now the paper is ready to be printed.