Many of our present ecological crises can be traced to our apparent unwillingness to adopt an economic system which acknowledges a need to live within limits. Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, this need not be so: no market exists without the conscious intention of humans to regard something as valuable and worth exchanging, meaning markets can change if we change the way we value things. A circular economy means a system of resource management where ‘waste’ is re-imagined as a valuable resource and ‘untapped’ old-growth forests, coal, and rare-earth mineral deposits need not be exploited because we have created a sufficiency from what we already have.
This article tracks the travails of the Australian paper industry in some depth. While this may seem a niche topic, it actually serves as an emblematic case study on the challenges of implementing a circular economy and ultimately forging a new economic system that serves not only some people but all people, all beings, and the complex web of interconnected planetary systems within which human society is fearfully and wonderfully entangled.
Collapse of the domestic paper industry
In January 2023, the Maryvale paper mill made headlines as it announced the end of Reflex copy paper production. The Latrobe Valley mill, owned since 2009 by Japanese paper giant Nippon Paper and operating under its Australian subsidiary Opal, would now focus exclusively on the recycling and production of cardboard products. The Maryvale Mill was the last producer of white graphic paper in Australia. Opal pinned the decision to close this part of the plant entirely on the ‘unplanned end of VicForests’ wood supply’, referring to the Victorian government’s decision to bring forward the moratorium on old-growth logging from 2030 to 2022. The government’s decision was made as VicForests was found guilty of breaching the law on several occasions, including spying on anti-logging activists. In more recent news, VicForests was shut down completely on 30 June 2024 following record losses of $54.2 million and $60.1 million in the last two financial years respectively, despite a $149 million state government bailout.
The concurrence of VicForests’ cessation of native forest logging and Maryvale’s closure of its copy paper mill demonstrates how much the two were propping each other up. There were few other takers for VicForests’ poor-quality timber, and few forestry companies could supply Maryvale so cheaply. It wasn’t very long ago that things looked quite different, however. In 2015, Australian Paper (owned by Nippon at the time, but yet to be rebranded as Opal) announced a $90 million de-inking facility that would produce post-consumer recycled printing paper, envelopes, and other stationery. It is not clear what has happened to that plant.
Consumption of copy paper in Australia is reported to have declined by 4-5% every year for the last decade, and the Maryvale Mill faces the same economic headwinds as any manufacturer in Australia. Most copy paper now sold in Australia is made in Indonesia.
Even in the domestic recycling industry, it is estimated around a third of paper and plastic in a kerbside recycling bin is sent overseas for processing. While there are at least two mills in Australia (both owned by Opal) that produce cardboard products from recycled paper and cardboard, there are none producing copy paper.
Recycled paper isn’t always what it seems, and the issues encountered in sourcing genuine post-consumer recycled paper relate to some larger problems in our economy at large.
Flaws in the regulatory framework
In answer to all of this, it would be common sense to investigate recycled paper alternatives (assuming everything possible has been done to reduce consumption in the first place). After all, recycled paper seems to be readily available at most major outlets, so what’s the big deal? The issue is that recycled paper isn’t always what it seems, and the issues encountered in sourcing genuine post-consumer recycled paper relate to some larger problems in our economy at large.
As part of its opposition to VicForests, The Wilderness Society ran an Ethical Paper campaign that called on consumers and businesses to boycott the Reflex brand of paper produced at the Maryvale Mill. Despite achieving its objectives, the Ethical Paper website (https://ethicalpaper.com.au) is still live and we took a look at the paper alternatives they recommended as ‘ethical.’ All of them were labelled as 100% recycled, but with a bit of digging this came to look like a fairly spurious claim in every case.
While some products recommended by the Ethical Paper campaign have been discontinued, there were a fair few still available. All of them, despite differences in appearance, were effectively made and sold by the same company: WINC, a large stationery supplier that sources its ‘recycled’ paper from a mill in Indonesia. Several were essentially the same product, repackaged to help large businesses and government agencies meet their ‘social procurement’ targets. Social procurement is a movement whereby procurement teams are encouraged to buy supplies from social enterprises or Indigenous-owned enterprises. Several Indigenous-owned stationery companies have sprung up to serve this market, however they have all done so in partnership with WINC, through its Australian partner, Paper Force.
That Indonesian mill, and Paper Force, is owned and run by Asian Pulp and Paper (APP), a sprawling Chinese/Indonesian conglomerate with mills and forests all over Asia. Its paper is certified by the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). The PEFC’s is one of two logos you’ll commonly see on wood-derived products, the other being the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC). Both of these organisations began in the 1990s as attempts to arrest the decimation of forests worldwide, with FSC cutting its teeth in the management of huge corporate forestry in the tropics, and PEFC geared more towards the fragmented landscape and logistical chains of European forestry. Nowadays they essentially compete for ‘market share’ in the regulatory space, trying to prove their credentials as tough regulators on the consumer side of the business—i.e. trying to be the ‘most trusted’ certification stamp—and trying to spruik their streamlined processes and low cost of certification on the business-to-business side of things.
Both certification bodies are built upon sprawling governance structures that incorporate global, regional, and national partner agencies and members, and this is where the whole question of certification runs into a sticky quagmire: the bulk of the funding for both these bodies comes from the forestry companies they aim to regulate. This is an issue replicated across our economy: regulators are dependent on the regulated and are thus vulnerable to capture by the very forces they are attempting to rein in. In the case of paper, the end result is obvious: an opaque landscape of dozens of certification grades and schemes, with very little regulatory oversight. For example, one product, Mandura, is described as 100% recycled. It is one of the Indigenous-owned brands supplied in partnership with WINC. On the product data sheet, however, it states that ‘PEFC™ Recycled means at least 70% PEFC™ certified material from recycled sources and wood from controlled sources.’ Note the significant and in that description, which implies any amount of wood may be allowed to count towards a 70% recycled figure! Furthermore, consider that ‘recycled’ isn’t defined as ‘post-consumer’ and could simply include paper sweepings from the factory floor, a common practice. One has to wonder whether ‘recycled’ means anything at that point.
Or take another product: Muru 100% recycled. This is another Indigenous-owned brand, produced in partnership with COS, a competitor with WINC, but the paper is sourced through Paper Force from the same Indonesian mill. COS states that its Muru 100% paper is not only PEFC certified as ‘100% post-consumer waste’ but also certified carbon neutral. The PEFC stamp that the product carries, however, only goes so far as to say ‘PEFC Certified: This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.’ It seems like the claim of ‘100% post-consumer waste’ must be taken completely on trust, with no way of verifying it.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on the complex tangle of things going on here. In these cases, social procurement targets—a positive initiative by governments seeking to assist for-purpose enterprises (such as Indigenous enterprises)—is unwittingly contributing to the thick veil of greenwashing that is stopping us from taking the necessary steps towards a genuinely circular economy or genuinely sustainable forestry. It is another variant of corporate capitalism’s genius in pitting social interests against ecological interests, the very same conflicts that lay behind the activities of VicForests and the Maryvale Mill.
Progress towards a circular economy?
The term ‘circular economy’ is rapidly becoming another buzzword to be splattered through marketing material and grant applications with as little thought as ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘sustainable.’ The rise of circular economy as a concept has been encouraged by bodies like the UN and World Economic Forum, and governments at the federal, state, and local levels are all using the notion to frame their ideals for economic transformation over the coming decades. It’s a useful concept: it speaks to a need for our society and economy to rethink ‘waste’ and move away from the extractive processes that are the key driving force behind climate change, mass extinctions, and resource scarcity, and it does this better than vague terms like ‘sustainable.’
The issues in domestic paper recycling—and the difficulty of sourcing truly recycled (i.e. post-consumer waste) paper at all, regardless of its origins—show us that we have a long way to go in tackling the perverse incentives that hold us back from implementing an actually circular economy.
Recycled copy paper may perform exactly the same as paper made directly from trees, but it benefits from the additional branding caché of having been recycled. On the flip side, it is more expensive (under current market conditions) to make than virgin paper products. So there are clear incentives to seek the word ‘recycled’ on your product and have it feature the green tick of a recognised regulatory body, without doing the more commercially challenging work of providing genuinely recycled products. The perverse incentives exist at the other end of the goods lifecycle too: people want to recycle their paper. They want to feel carefree as they pop their discarded waste into a bin, handing responsibility for their consumption over to someone else. So there’s an incentive on the part of waste collectors to look like they’re doing the right thing and palm off their ‘recycled’ goods to someone else. And there’s an incentive for that someone else to make it look like they’re doing the right thing with those goods. And so on down the line.
Further, the more it looks and feels like we do have a genuinely circular economy, the more we as individuals can feel careless about our consumption. If a product is branded as 100% post-consumer recycled, you’ll obviously feel better about buying it. And if you have a recycling bin to put that product in when you’re ready to discard it, you’ll feel better about discarding it. In other words, the more we implement a circular economy, the faster we can spin that cycle with no ethical alarm bells ringing.
Paper offers yet another intriguing insight in that regard. The wood fibres from which paper is made are of a certain length when a log is pulped. With every run through the recycling mill, those fibres are chopped shorter. Generally, it is estimated that paper can be recycled into paper again only seven or eight times. At each successive step of recycling, the fibres are degraded and require virgin pulp to be mixed in.
Will recyclers sort paper according to its ‘generational content’ or fibre quality when deciding what product to recycle it into? And what will be done with the piles of dust those fibres have been reduced to when they have been spun through several iterations of paper and cardboard?
The recycling of glass, metal, plastic and all other materials present differing versions of the same problem. Some materials can be recycled a near infinite number of times whereas others can only be used once and have no currently available pathway for recycling. Others technically can be recycled, but the products they are being turned into must be marketed competitively alongside others made from cheaper virgin materials and prove a tough sell without government intervention to sway the market. This is equally true of things like bollards and park benches made from soft plastics.
The issues in domestic paper recycling ... show us that we have a long way to go in tackling the perverse incentives that hold us back from implementing an actually circular economy.
What can we do?
It should be evident from the explorations documented above that reducing our consumption should be the first port of call when acting on any matter related to our impact on the world around us. Even if we maximised the proportion of 100% post-consumer recycled materials in everything our society consumes but there was no reduction in the volume of consumption, it seems fair to assume that we would still have significant ecological challenges with which to contend. It would be a vastly improved situation compared to today’s extractive mayhem, but would it balance out the energy required to power the recycling process? From the logistics of moving so much material to the energy spent processing it, and the inevitable losses along the way, requiring topping up from ‘virgin’ sources, it seems an open guess.
There is a good reason that paper consumption in Australia has only declined by 4-5% per year over the last decade, and not by a much higher degree: the fact is paper still has its uses. Furthermore, we should not imagine that shifting to electronic documents and cloud computing gets us off the hook environmentally. These come with their own massive energy, materials, and waste footprint, which is perhaps even more out of sight and out of mind.
So, given we must use paper sometimes, it would be a positive step if we could get used to seeing brown or less-white paper as the norm. There can be issues with readability and eyestrain, and it’s not obvious if these are easily rectified, but getting used to reading words on flecked brown paper would make much less demand on recyclers. In our research, Ecocern is one Australian manufacturer of truly 100% post-consumer recycled paper, and all their copy paper is brown and contains flecks of colour that cannot be easily removed. In the event that we feel we must or really want to use paper for something, this seems to be as good as it gets, for now.
Tom Allen is a Victorian farmer, creator, and educator who believes in the power of small scale enterprise to create much needed shifts in our ecological awareness. He currently lives in Warrnambool and is working with Worn Gundidj to implement circular economy initiatives in the horticulture sector, and operates a gourmet mushroom farm in Drysdale.