Recycling of Paper: how many times?
Every time our year ends with very special celebrations that being Christmas celebration and New year’s eve party. As the celebration brings a flurry of cheerful and colorful memories but it also brings the spirit of gift giving to the loved ones along with it. Lights, gifts and ornaments make this time of the year a very special one. But a major part of this holiday cheer ultimately ends up in the waste basket unfortunately. At the end of this holiday cheer every year many holiday revelers find themselves in the centre of an enormous pile of wrapping paper and empty cardboard boxes. Some of them throw away these wrapping papers and cardboard boxes in the waste basket or in the recycle bin. But at some point of time you must have wondered that approximately how many times can a piece of paper be recycled?
How many times can paper be recycled?
On an average a paper can be recycled maximum up to five or six times. Paper is heated and chopped into tiny pieces to make a pulp at any recycling plant. During the process of making the pulp, each of the long fibers that were a part of the virgin paper has an approximately twenty percent chance of being cut into strand. These stands can be too small to be useful to paper makers. Short strands of wood fiber can only produce extremely weak paper which are suitable for newsprint or other applications in which quality is not that important. It is said that a paper fiber only has five lives but according to theory, a strand can survive the pulping process twenty, thirty or even hundred rounds of recycling unscathed.
During the process
When the paper gets recycled the paper is mixed with water, then it is being grounded up in a machine which is like a giant blender. This converts the paper back to its pulp formation, but this new pulp is not exactly the same as the original paper was with which the recycling process was started. All the blending and grinding process shortens and weakens the fiber which makes the recycled paper weaker and easier to tear. The recycled paper becomes weak as the interlocking fibers aren’t long or strong as before.
After several instances of recycling even if the paper fiber maintains its shape it would definitely lose some of its original qualities. Paper goes through a process known as hornification after it has been dried and again resoaked in water. In this process, the internal structures contract which causes the fiber to collapse slightly and lose its structural integrity. To combat hornification recyclers generally adds virgin paper to a batch of recycled pulp. Every time a paper gets recycled its brightness fades that is why some eco-friendly papers have a slightly grayish hue. A recycled paper also has better opacity than porcelain virgin paper.
As a paper loses its quality after every time it is recycled, there is a hierarchy that every paper goes through until the part when it can no more be recycled. The fibers that were part of a writing paper can be returned to a notepad if they retain most of their good qualities after being recycled. However, after every cycle they typically are recycled into something less eminent, such as facial tissues, milk cartons or even toilet paper. The corrugated boxes generally are turned into shoe boxes or cereal boxes.
But there is a high chance that you will never get to see the next life of your cardboard box after being recycled. Approximately forty percent of waste paper is generally shipped abroad, generally to China because it doesn’t have enough forestland to satisfy and provide for the country’s demand for paper. For recyclers the deficiency of China’s ability to meet its paper demand is a good thing.
