Chapter 17
I’m not going to pretend the machine isn’t turning out some properly wonderful papers; and I’m not going to say it isn’t doing far better things than ever I thought it would do. I don’t laugh at it as my grandfather did, or shake my head at it as my father used. I recognize our craft is going down hill. But we ain’t at the bottom by a long way; and when we get there will go game and die like gentlemen.
—EDEN PHILLPOTTS, Storm in a Teacup
NEW TECHNOLOGY SELDOM ELIMINATES OLD TECHNOLogy. It only creates another alternative. When paper became an industrial product, it was not the end of handmade paper. Handmade paper is still being made, because there are still people who want it, even if it costs considerably more. There are also people who will pay more for linen, rather than wood, paper. But most paper today is made from wood on huge machines.
Early in the twentieth century, when there was a tremendous nostalgia for the old preindustrial trades, an English writer named Eden Phillpotts wrote a series of novels romanticizing these trades. His 1919 Storm in a Teacup is set in a nineteenth-century English paper mill. The papermakers know that the Industrial Revolution is overtaking them. One papermaker says, “Hand-made paper is battling for its life in one sense—like a good many other hand-made things. But the machine hasn’t caught us yet and it will be a devil of a long time before it does, I hope.”
To Phillpotts, these nineteenth-century papermakers did not recognize the enormity of the time bomb they were sitting on. He himself probably thought that handmade paper was done for, that the world in which papermakers were valued for their very distinct handicraft, a world where the vatman “knew his worth,” as he put it, and could find work anywhere because of his skill, was finished.
Today, a paper mill is no longer a small place with a vat or two, a rag room and a drying loft, employing 30 to 150 workers, each with a very specific and demanding skill. A paper mill is, first of all, no longer a mill at all. It does not derive its power from a paddle wheel in an adjacent river, though it is still always located by a river because it needs water for papermaking. The Fourdrinier machine conceived of in the eighteenth century is still in use, but now it is powered by electricity and very large and very fast. Papermaking skill lies more in the mill’s machine than in the workers who maintain it and keep it running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The Glatfelter mill, still located in the same small town, now called Spring Grove, a short ride from Gettysburg, is neither a small paper mill nor an industrial giant. But in an industry where size has become a crucial advantage, as it always is for fairly low-priced products, Glatfelter is big enough. Today’s giant companies, such as International Paper, were created by merging numerous smaller companies together, many of which had already acquired several even smaller companies. International Paper started in 1898, when it combined eighteen different papermaking companies.
The same process of merging smaller paper mills together into a number of larger mills has taken place all over the world. In Fabriano, Italy, the process began with the Milani family in the eighteenth century. Pietro Milani dreamed of buying out other small Fabriano mills to create one big one, and started by acquiring the Cartiere Milani Fabriano in 1782, to form the Milani Fabriano Paper Company. The Milani family continued making acquisitions whenever there were opportunities, and by the twentieth century, they were the only papermaker in Fabriano. They called themselves Fabriano Mills. In their advertising, they played on the confusion between the name of their town and the name of their mill, claiming that Fabriano Mills had been making paper since 1264. That was not exactly the case; it was true of the town, but not of the Fabriano Mills.
In 2002 the Fedrigoni Group of Verona, which owns three other large Italian mills, bought Fabriano. Today, they make 20 percent of Italian copy paper, the drawing paper used by most Italian schoolchildren, and fine-art paper. They also have a division that makes the fine paper needed for the Euro currency, assuring its security with a series of complicated watermarks. For paper-history buffs, it is nice to know that this is being done in the same town where the watermark was invented.
EVERY DAY, 150 tractor-trailers loaded with both hard- and softwood logs arrive at the Glatfelter mill. Each log is gobbled up and churned into a pile of chips in seconds. These chips then become pulp for the 1,000 tons of different kinds of paper that the mill produces daily. Diversity of product is the key to success in the modern paper industry, which is one of the reasons why paper companies keep trying to expand.
Over the centuries, the Crane Company has succeeded in finding new products every time there has been a downturn in the economy. In the depression following the Civil War, the Crane mill remained prosperous by making the cardboard men’s shirt collars that had become fashionable; since the collars were made of thin cardboard, men needed a new one every day, resulting in huge quantities of sales. Then in 1873, the Winchester Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, was trying to perfect the repeating rifle—a rapid-fire weapon introduced in the Civil War, for which shell wrappers of a very thin and highly flammable paper were needed. Crane developed this paper and prospered throughout the 1870s, when other mills were going bankrupt in a difficult economy. Six years later, in 1879, Crane obtained a contract from the US Treasury to make dollars.
The Curtis Company, founded in Delaware in 1789, survived the Great Depression with a special all-rag paper that they first developed for Fortune magazine—although in time the magazine decided to return to using less-expensive wood-chip paper. Curtis got through World War II by manufacturing fiber paper, which they made by treating cotton paper with zinc chloride. Fiber paper was used for insulated boxes. Then, at the end of the twentieth century, a time of consolidation in many industries, Curtis, the oldest operating paper mill in America, went out of business.
By then, everyone in the papermaking industry was scrambling to find a niche, ideally one of low tonnage and high price. And there are a lot of peculiar niches in the paper business; finding one to excel at is one key to success. Circuit boards have foundations made of paper; paper is used in artificial flooring; fast-food restaurants need thin paper for wrapping. One company tried to save itself with the “leather” labels on blue jeans, which are actually made from paper.
The Glatfelter mill is still known for book paper, which is how they started. But now, what is called “communication paper”—that is, paper for writing and printing—is only about half of their output. They also make the paper for US postage stamps, wallpaper, diapers, paper towels, teabags, bottle labels, greeting cards, and envelopes. Their teabag paper is not made from wood pulp but from the stalk of abaca, a banana-like plant grown in the Philippines. Abaca was first used as a paper source at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Successful paper mills emphasize efficiency and try not to produce waste. The considerable quantities of water they use are cleaned of impurities and put back into the river; the impurities can then be processed for reuse. Any paper scraps or defective paper is re-pulped to make new paper. Like almost all modern paper mills, Glatfelter runs on electricity, which they supply with their own coal-fired power plant. The plant provides 130 percent of their needs and they sell the extra energy to the town, meaning that they also operate as a power utility.
IN A MODERN paper mill, logs are quickly stripped of bark and chipped, and the chips are reduced to mush by the chemicals in the digester. Dyes are added at this stage of the process. At Glatfelter, there are seventy-eight shades of white alone. Chemicals are also added to make some kinds of paper more compatible with certain kinds of printing and to make paper more opaque. Georgia clay is one of the common additives used.
The modern Fourdrinier is basically the same machine as the one Robert invented at the end of the eighteenth century, but now it is powered by electricity, two stories high, and as long as a football field. Glatfelter has five of them, and each of its machines is newer, faster, and larger than the one previously installed. Larger plants sometimes have fewer but even larger machines.
The oldest machine at Glatfelter dates from 1907, and it was a state-of the-art model when it came out—a beautiful creation with swirls and curlicues of green cast-iron grill work on one side, resembling a miniature fin de siècle Parisian bridge. It produces three tons of paper an hour, which was a dizzying amount in 1907. But between 1920 and 1923, the mill installed two new machines, each producing seven tons an hour, and in 1956, it installed a machine that makes fifteen tons an hour. Yet another machine was added in 1965; it also produces fifteen tons an hour.
Paper production begins at the wet end of the machine, where pulp and water are poured in the “head box” at a concentration of about .5 percent pulp and 99.5 percent water. The width of the opening that releases the pulp onto the moving screen below determines the thickness of the paper. This moving screen is no longer made of wire, as it was in previous centuries, but of monofilament, a kind of thin plastic that is used for fishing line. Because of this, machine-made paper resembles wove paper; laid paper remains a handmade product. This has caused the two to switch places on the ladder of status. With its ribbing caused by wire molds, laid paper has the handmade look that is preferred for high-end products such as stationery or art paper. The paper appears handmade but can be made much more inexpensively.
On the moving screen of the modern Fourdrinier machines, the long, wet pulp passes from the head box through a roller of wire known as the dandy roll. Here, the fibers are made to change direction so that rather than all lying the same way, they become randomly interwoven. Watermarks can also be added on the dandy roll. The pulp then passes three suction boxes that suck out the water. This is the most magical part of the process: a belt covered with translucent slush approaches the suction boxes and within the space of a yard, this thin, wet film visibly turns into paper. Then it is pressed and snaked up and down through a series of heated rollers. These dry the paper. From there, it moves through heated vertical rollers to give it a finish. Last, a starch sizing is added if the paper is intended to be used for writing or printing. The finished paper is still 5 percent water.
The two newest machines at Glatfelter, both already more than a half century old, don’t have dandy rolls. Dandy rolls cause clay and other powders in the pulp to sink to the bottom, giving the paper two distinct sides, similar to the felt and wire sides of old, with the wire side being preferable for printing and some artists preferring the felt side. Glatfelter’s newer machines have a top wire former instead of a dandy roll. It sucks the water up instead of down. The solids rise and then start to sink, ending up in the middle of the pulp, so that both sides of the paper are the same.
The noise these machines make is a deafening hum—it is a very even sound, but so loud that it is difficult to hear someone shouting. The huge rooms look empty. Occasionally someone is seen passing through. But there is no proud vatman or coucher plying their demanding craft, no busy room of fleet-fingered rag sorters. Instead, there is a soundproof room with computers that monitor the machines and workers who monitor the computers. If something were to go awry with a machine, workers would suddenly swarm into the once-empty papermaking room.
Working in a paper mill, as the nineteenth-century novelist Eden Phillpotts understood, has always been demanding labor. The machines never stop running, but are in operation seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, because the only way to make them profitable is to produce as much paper as possible. Spring Grove is a mill town and the 1,000 workers employed by Glatfelter work seven days a week. They don’t complain because they consider themselves to be well paid. Their Saturday shift pays time and a half, and Sunday is double-time, so they earn almost a second week’s salary on the weekends. They alternate shifts at different times of day and night to arrange time with their families.
THE PAPER INDUSTRY has always caused people a considerable amount of discomfort. When paper was made from rags and mills were close to population centers, there was anger about the noise and the smell, fear of spreading disease, and some worry about what was happening to the water supply. But as soon as paper started to be made from trees, concern shifted to the destruction of the forests. The 150 truckloads of large tree trunks being gobbled up every single day at the Glatfelter mill is worrisome enough, but the supersized paper mills gobble up far more.
Back in 1923, International Paper had fifty-three mills and was the largest paper producer in the world. They had bought up huge tracts of forest in New York state, northern New England, and Canada, and had leased still more; that year, they had the rights to 4,460,080 acres of forest in the United States and in Canada. Most of that property was in eastern Canada; as American paper companies grew, more and more paper was being made from Canadian trees.
International Paper chopped down hemlock, fir, spruce, and a small number of poplar trees, and was focused on the newsprint business, which had become a very lucrative trade because its paper could be made inexpensively in tremendous quantities. The preferable wood for this trade was spruce. According to the company, it turned 7 million cords of pulpwood into paper in 1923. An acre of land grew an estimated five cords of pulpwood, so the company had consumed the wood of 140,000 acres, or 220 square miles, of forestland in a single year.
International Paper and other companies that were harvesting Canadian trees were stripping the country of a valuable resource while not even providing many jobs. In 1923, International Paper estimated that a lumber camp needed only forty to fifty men to harvest between 2,500 and 3,500 cords of wood in a season. Paper harvesting usually began on May 1 and ended in mid-August; this was the period when the sap was running, which made the bark easy to strip from trunks. Stripping the bark reduced the weight of the logs and thus lowered shipping costs. Some accused the paper companies of clear-cutting—indiscriminately stripping miles of forestland bare. These accusations weren’t always fair, because paper companies were selective about which trees they wanted to harvest. But with or without clear-cutting, hundreds of thousands of acres were being destroyed.
Canadians, as well as US conservationists, were growing angry. Was Canada to lose its forests just because Americans wanted to read a lot of newspapers cheaply? In November 1899, J. R. Stratton, a new minister in the Ontario government, started getting coverage in The Paper Mill, an industry newspaper, for expressing such a view. He also wanted to make certain, he said, to “secure for the Province of Ontario the largest share of profits accruing from the conversion of raw material into finished products.”
The paper industry, both in the United States and worldwide, continues to be pressured on this environmental issue. Consumers do not want paper made from clear-cutting rain forests or other ecologically unique virgin forests. There have been successful campaigns to get consumers to avoid such papers or even to avoid paper entirely by switching to electronic alternatives. Some have even called for a boycott of toilet paper, although this is not likely to catch on since, so far, no one has found an electronic alternative to toilet paper.
Thanks to a hard-fought battle, there is now fairly broad acceptance of tree farming, in which harvested areas are replanted to keep the forest sustainable. The US paper industry is quick to point out that there are more trees growing in the United States today than there were one hundred years ago. While this is undoubtedly true, it is also true that a high percentage of these trees were planted to replace harvested trees and that wild virgin forestland has been considerably reduced. Since any species, plant or animal, depends on numerous other species to flourish, the loss of old-growth forests is not simply a loss of trees. In the American South, as recently as the 1930s, flying squirrels were so common that there were recipes for them—they were a favorite local dish. But today, flying squirrels are a scarcity because they live only in old-growth forests.
Most wood-chip paper in the world today is made from sustainable tree plantations. In Brazil, where a highly publicized fight between environmentalists and paper companies over the destruction of the rain forest took place, papermakers are now making paper from eucalyptus trees grown on plantations. A native of Australia, eucalyptus was brought to Brazil in the early twentieth century for use in the construction and charcoal businesses. It has short, exceptionally sturdy fibers that make its paper opaque, which is good for printing. Its fibers are also soft, making it good for tissue. Eucalyptus is an excellent plantation crop because it grows quickly and does not drain the soil of minerals.
Eucalyptus has changed Brazilian papermaking. Once dependent on imports for 75 percent of its pulp, Brazil is now an exporter of paper pulp. Two eucalyptus-based paper mills have also opened in Uruguay, which previously had no papermaking industry. Millions of acres of eucalyptus have been planted in Brazil, which has led some environmentalists to worry about the repercussions of introducing a non-native species on such a large scale. But no one argues that cutting down rain forests would be better.
One of the most recent fights involving the paper industry occurred in Indonesia, where Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of the largest paper companies in the world, is based. It was the last place on Earth where a virgin rain forest was still being clear-cut for paper. But due to an international outcry against the practice, APP began planting acacia trees to use for making paper pulp instead. Like eucalyptus trees, acacia trees can be farmed. The international outcry had yielded results.
Emmanuelle Neyroumande, the Paris-based pulp and paper global manager for the World Wildlife Fund International, said of the paper industry: “It is an industry that has found that being environmentally friendly positions them well in the market. The big players tend to take the matter seriously.” She cited Brazil as an example. “In Brazil the industry has tried to take environmentalism as a marketing tool. They are trying to restore forest.”
Many campaigns continue to advise people to shun paper and turn to electronics to “save a tree.” But doing so does not always save a tree, and when it does, the tree it saves may have been farmed sustainably. Company pleas to accept electronic billing rather than bills sent through the mail are not so much about saving trees as they are about saving the company billing expenses. Neyroumande said that she does not favor such messages. “Electronics has an environmental impact too,” she pointed out. “I am pushing that we avoid simplistic messages. . . . You have to decide what you are using the paper for, how long will you keep it, is it necessary. You should avoid wastefulness.”
What worries the World Wildlife Fund is that the amount of land available for tree farming might not be able to keep up with the demand for paper. “There is a growing population,” said Neyroumande. “Where are we going to grow our crop? The planet is not big enough. We need a circular economy so that we use everything. If we made all our paper from forest the planet is not big enough.” According to a World Wildlife Fund study, paper use will triple by the year 2050 because of increasing population. Most people in the paper industry, however, do not find this statistic credible. It could happen, but there is no way to know.
Nevertheless the concept of “saving a tree” remains a potent marketing plea and an incentive for reviving some old ideas about papermaking sources. One old idea that has gained new acceptance is making paper out of the scrap from sugarcane, called bagasse.
SUGARCANE IS A very thick grass that when squeezed through rollers produces a juice that can be cooked down to sugar and molasses. What remains is a dry, flattened stalk. Like most grass, a great deal of this stalk is cellulose fibers. Most cane is about 53 percent cellulose and only between 2 and 3 percent lignin, making it a better source for paper than most wood if its fibers are broken down efficiently. The sugar mill has little use for this waste, the bagasse, other than to burn it; sugar mills need constant fires to cook the sugarcane juice.
Since the late nineteenth century, when it was becoming apparent that forests were not limitless, there has been interest in making bagasse paper. Many of the sugar-producing areas of the world need paper but do not have forests, in some cases because the land was cleared centuries ago to plant sugar. In 1917, paper was made in New Iberia, Louisiana, with a mixture of bagasse and rice straw, both readily available in the area. Other places made it with cornhusks, and some places added in wood chips. In 1944 a mill opened in Puerto Rico that made paper from bagasse in combination with local scrap paper. In 1951 a paper mill started in Monte Alegre, Brazil, that made high-quality paper from a combination of bagasse, eucalyptus, and rags.
Among the places that have either experimented with or gone into full commercial production of bagasse paper are Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Nigeria, and India. In the first half of the twentieth century, patents for bagasse paper processes were regularly submitted. In 1915, the Weekly Bulletin of the Canadian Department of Trade and Commerce reported that a good quality of bagasse was being made in Preston, Cuba (a town today called Guatemala), named after an executive of the United Fruit Company, which made sugar there. In 1928, Celulosa Cubana, S.A., founded by sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda, began making bagasse paper in Tuinucu, Cuba. Paper shortages during World War II gave new importance to bagasse paper. In 1943 a mill in Santa Fe, Argentina, started producing bagasse paper. Two new bagasse paper mills were installed in the cane fields of Cuba.
The manufacture of bagasse pulp in Peru increased every year between 1940, with 800 tons, and 1945, with almost 5,000 tons. By 1950, Peru’s Grace & Company had built a bagasse paper mill in Paramonga. Grace was named for its founder, an Irishman, William Russell Grace, who made his fortune in Peru on bird droppings, or guano, which is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus and valuable for making fertilizer and gunpowder. The company then branched out into shipping, sugar refining, and bagasse paper. It made very light airmail paper, a new product at the time, paper for bags, wrapping paper, and corrugated cardboard for boxes. According to a 1951 Business Week article, Grace saved several Peruvian newspapers from closing by providing them with bagasse newsprint.
But there was a problem with bagasse: It is 60 percent fiber and 40 percent pith, a soft, non-fibrous matter. The pith clings to the fiber and the fiber must be separated from it. This takes a good deal of time and costs money; in fact, most of the cost of making bagasse paper lies in this separation problem. There are British patents for ways of dealing with this problem dating back to 1907 and 1908. But Grace had a better idea. In 1953 his company hired Clarence Birdseye, famous for developing commercial frozen food. Birdseye was a restless genius with some three hundred patents to his credit on everything from packaging to lightbulbs, and had recently come up with a faster, more efficient way to process bagasse.
In Florida and Louisiana, sugar mills were using a cold-water separation process for bagasse; Birdseye’s process involved using hot water in a confined tube under pressure. The Birdseye method was implemented in Peru. But then Birdseye himself dropped dead from a heart attack while at the Gramercy Hotel in New York City and Grace left the Paramonga mill.
Grace went on to start a paper mill in the sugar-growing region of Colombia near Cali in partnership with International Paper. But soon Grace sold its share to International Paper and decided to get out of the paper business altogether. The Colombian government started a second bagasse mill and believing, as many did, that bagasse was only good for low-grade paper, focused on newsprint, a product that was in precipitous decline. Failing, they sold their mill to International Paper. In 1997, International Paper decided to leave Colombia, thus leaving Cali with two abandoned paper mills.
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THOSE WHO HAVE never seen a sugar plantation, an industry associated with hardship and suffering, are not prepared for how beautiful sugarcane fields can be. They look like a vast, rolling green-and-silver sea, heaving and rippling in the wind. If there are mountains on the distant horizon, as in the Cauca valley, Colombia, where the high and rugged cordilleras appear as a distant rocky coastline, the landscape is especially stunning.
Unlike almost all the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the plantations of the Cauca valley are not mired in poverty. The difference can be quickly spotted. In most cane-growing areas, all the cane is in the same stage of development—small seedlings or mid-growth plants or tall plants with feathery sprouts on top ready to harvest. But here, the plantations are divided into separate rectangular plots about the size of a football field—each one called a suerte, which means “luck”—and the suertes are in different stages of development. The biggest economic problem with sugar production in most places is that it is seasonal and there is no work half the year, “the dead season.” But in the Cauca valley, there is no dead season because in 1985 a Colombian laboratory developed a strain of sugarcane, prosaically named CC 85-92, that can be grown and harvested any time of year.
This has made it possible for the Incauca mill, owned by a Colombian multinational corporation, to employ 8,000 sugar workers year-round. Incauca’s two crushing machines process 1,400 metric tons of cane a day. The cane is crushed and juice extracted. Some of that juice is cooked into sugar crystals, and some is processed into ethanol, a sellable energy source. Incauca produces 360,000 liters of ethanol every day. Then the cane that has been crushed is crushed yet more to extract even more juice, leaving behind bagasse, which by this point is nothing but a fibrous brown powder. This is blown into machines with three-foot-high steel screens. The screens block the fiber, but the dried pith blows through.
The pith powder is burned to produce energy both for the plant and to sell. The sugar mill produces 10 megawatts of electricity from bagasse every hour and operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The energy that the plant does not use is sold to the national electric grid, and the leftover fiber bagasse is sold to Carvajal Pulp & Paper, one of the largest family-owned companies in Colombia. Since cane is 30 percent bagasse, selling it rather than throwing it away is commercially important for the sugar plant. Incauca is the largest sugar mill in Colombia, but there are twelve others, all of them located in the Cauca valley. A number of them also sell bagasse to Carvajal. Some do not separate out the pith, but what they may save in not performing that process, they lose in not having the pith to burn for energy. Carvajal buys unseparated bagasse and separates it themselves, deriving energy for their paper mill.
Like Incauca and the valley’s other sugar mills, Carvajal operates seven days a week, and every day thirty large triple-trailer trucks hauling 25 metric tons of bagasse per truck, packed in tightly pressed bails, arrive at its doors. And that is the delivery just from Incauca. Alongside Carvajal rises a brown badlands of mountains and buttes of bagasse waiting to be processed. Fiber that has been separated from pith is washed in water two times, then put in a digester and cooked with caustic soda. Bagasse contains much less lignin than wood pulp and does not require as much cooking or as many chemicals. When the bagasse is finished cooking, the toxic by-product of caustic soda left at the bottom of the digester is reduced to a chemical compound that can be used to remake caustic soda. The water used in the papermaking is also treated and restored before being pumped back into the river.
The bagasse pulp is bleached with chloride dioxide and hydrogen. Processed wood pulp is naturally dark brown in color, but processed bagasse is a cream color, so it needs much less bleaching. From there, the bagasse pulp is processed much like wood pulp, in large Fourdrinier machines, with water pumped from the adjacent Rio Palo. The main mill produces 400 metric tons of paper every day, 80 percent of which is photocopy paper. A second mill nearby produces magazine paper that a US company sells under the brand name Treefrog, suggesting that if you use bagasse paper, tree frogs won’t be harmed.
There are other bagasse paper mills in the world, but Carvajal claims to be the only one that makes 100 percent bagasse paper. In 2000, the Quenu Newsprint Paper Company of Cairo started producing newsprint and graphic paper that was 75 percent bagasse. Tamil Nadu Newsprint and Papers Limited in southern India claims that it also has been making 100 percent bagasse paper since 1996 and also claims to be one of the most environmentally compliant paper mills in the world. The environmental advantages of bagasse paper are almost always central to its marketing. In 1972, Wells Fargo bank was flooded with letters and messages of support when they started making checks from bagasse paper.
IN AN AGE of climate change, making paper uses far too much energy, regardless of whether it is made from wood or bagasse. Large paper mills usually produce their own energy and in too many cases, that energy is coal fired and therefore a major source of carbon emissions. Pollution is the other big issue with the paper industry. Carvajal, Glatfelter, and many of the large mills now reprocess their water before putting it back in the river. But this is occurring only after a long fight. For centuries, paper mills took river water, infused it with toxic chemicals to break down fibers, and then just dumped it back in, literally turning the rivers black.
The public and government complained. In the early centuries of papermaking, their complaint was with the by-product of rags, which sometimes contained tar from old ship ropes. The rags carried a terrible smell, which they passed on to the rivers. Then, once mills switched to using wood chips, complaints died down. A 1917 letter from an official at Oxford University, which had once complained about the nearby Wolvercote Mill, said that it was good the mill had switched to wood because “it was feared that the mill would have to close because no solution to the problem [of water pollution] could be found.”
But ultimately, switching to wood was not a solution; the pulp was being treated with caustic soda and a toxic cocktail was being pumped back into the river. The paper industry did not have the sensitivity to environmental concerns that it does today, because it had little awareness of how strongly the public felt about the issue. The great contribution of environmental movements is that they have made industry, or at least some industries, aware that good environmental policy is good for business.
One of the first paper mills to realize this was Crane in Dalton, Massachusetts, which gained a great deal of public support in 1952 when they started spending $100,000 a year to clean up the Housatonic River. By then, they had been polluting that river for a century and a half. Crane began sending their water through miles of pipe—with equipment they called a “flocculator” and a “clarifier”—into ponds where the impurities settled out. The water then reentered the river. Crane also used a local sewage treatment plant for particularly difficult waters. In the mid-1950s, the Curtis Paper Company in Delaware devised a similar system for flowing the water through “settling ponds.”
Treating water—and boasting of it to the public—was becoming the new way for modern paper mills to operate. By the 1950s, what was called “soda recovery” had become mandatory in Britain, the United States, and many other countries. Or at least, it had become illegal to dump untreated waters into rivers and streams. The wastewater from papermaking contains caustic alkali, some fibers, and some chemical impurities from the wood itself, as well as sulfite and sulfate, which are contributed by the digesters. These contaminated waters can be cooked down to a syrup and burned. The resulting ash is largely made up of sodium carbonate, which can then be converted to sodium hydrate and reused in the digester.
In this manner, between 80 and 90 percent of the sodium carbonate, or soda, is recovered for reuse. This is not only of environmental value but of economic value. But it takes a considerable investment to implement it. So it becomes something that is easily done by large companies, corporations, and multinationals, but is almost impossible to do for small operations. And thus, it is one more factor that favors the large over the small in modern papermaking.
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THOUGH ONE OF the attractions of paper has been that it was cheap and easy to throw away, it has long seemed to some that it was wasteful to throw out huge amounts of paper. In 1870, a French inventor claimed he could clean the ink off of paper so that it could be reused as new paper, but no one seemed to believe him.
On April 28, 1800, Matthias Koops was granted an English patent for “Extracting Ink from Paper and Converting Such Paper into Pulp.” In the patent, Koops described his process as “An invention made by me of extracting printing and writing ink from printed and written paper, and converting the paper from which the ink is extracted into pulp, and making thereof paper fit for writing, printing, and other purposes.” In the second edition of Koops’s book on alternative sources for paper pulp, he used recycled paper for some of the pages. That was probably the first time anything was printed on recycled paper in the West, though Japan had been recycling paper since the eleventh century and the Indians, even earlier. Over time Koops’s recycled paper pages have held up better than his wood-chip pages.
It took a long time for Koops’s idea regarding ink removal from paper to be embraced. But finally, in 1939, the Wolvercote Mill in Oxford became one of the first mills in England to build a plant for “de-inking” paper. Koops’s process is similar to what is done today, though the quality of the resulting recycled paper has steadily improved over the decades. Printed paper is chopped up and washed with soaps and chemicals to remove the ink. Recycled paper is very popular with consumers, and that makes it popular with papermakers. In the United States today, about three-quarters of paper mills do some recycling, and 113 mills out of about 500 work exclusively on recycled paper.
But there is a problem. Although all environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency support recycling paper, the environmental benefits are not clear. The chemicals and inks that are left from the process are highly toxic, and some papermakers find that it takes more energy to make recycled paper than it does to make wood-chip paper. Recycled paper is most cost- and energy-efficient, and therefore most environmentally beneficial, when it is used to make cardboard and other low-quality paper. But consumers like to have their printer paper, and even their checks, made of recycled paper. So what is the benefit of recycled paper? Perhaps it is simply that because we live in a world overrun with garbage, it is gratifying to see used paper going into making something useful rather than ending up in a landfill.