Pulp and Paper Industry Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Pulp and Paper Industry Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Pulpis the fibrous material found in paper. While pulp can be made from diverse materials such as cloth rags, hemp, and straw, tree pulp remains the most popular. Trees of small diameters, tree limbs or crowns, or waste from lumber manufacturing are often pulped. Recovered wastepaper has gained importance in recent years. Electronic substitution for print materials has led to some reduction in paper demand, although new product lines also emerge for pulp. For example, fluff pulp is used in baby diapers and other highly absorbent products.

During wood pulping cellulose is separated from lignin, a natural polymer, which bonds the cellulose fibers together to create structure in trees. Mechanical, chemical, or chemi-thermomechanical pulping processes are most often used. The process chosen depends on the final product or paper grade that is desired and the input material. Hardwoods may be too dense for mechanical pulping. Softwoods are preferred for paper due to their long, slender fibers, which provide strength in paper products. Virgin pulp is often mixed with mill residues, such as saw chips or sawdust.

Pulping produces significant chemical and biological waste. Breaking down wood chips through grinding requires significant energy input. Some comes from fossil fuels, although mills can burn by-products to produce a portion of the energy required for processing. Chemicals, such as sulfite and sulfate (kraft), can dissolve lignin in heated “digesters,” but a variety of hazardous air pollutants are released. The recovery of the chemicals to be reused is usually viewed favorably, yet it generates additional emissions. Chemical pulping also produces tons of solid waste, made up of lignin and wood fibers, for every ton of pulp created.

If white paper is desired, bleaching occurs. Vents from bleaching tanks emit air pollutants. Nonchlorinated bleaching agents are available, but they are less popular. Highly toxic elemental chlorine has been phased out in most mills and replaced with chlorine dioxide, but bleaching processes still generate a large volume of liquid waste with toxic chemicals such as dioxins, furans, and chlorinated organics. Some of these pollutants pass though treatment plants and are discharged into water supplies. Mills are often located adjacent to water bodies given their high utilization of water.

There is technical capacity to build efficient mills that have no liquid discharge and recycle their chemical input, but they are expensive. Traditional mills release large quantities of by-products such as volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and carcinogens. Bioaccumulation of absorbable organic halides often occurs in nearby fish populations. Environmental standards are often based on fish mortality during brief exposure to wastewater. Environmental advocacy groups argue that such tests are insufficient because they do not look at extended exposure over time or the potential for compounded results after mixing occurs with other toxins in the surrounding ecosystem.

The pulp industry is very capital intensive. Current economic returns are poor when compared to a decade ago. Dozens of mills in North America and Western Europe have shut down since 2000. Consolidations of plants owned by the same company, as well as merging between pulp giants, have become common. However, the world’s largest pulp and paper companies are still found in the United States, Finland, and Japan.

While the global pulp and paper industry has traditionally been monopolized by a limited number of multinational corporations, a major capacity surge has initiated from the Southern Hemisphere. A global transition is occurring because of the ability to produce pulp quickly and at lower costs in places like South America and Asia. Furthermore, as many different types of manufacturing are transferred to developing countries, commercial packaging needs for products such as labels and containerboard lead to further restructuring of the paper industry.

In spite of improvements since the mid-1990s there is still limited use of and demand for recycled paper. Recycled paper products need to be collected in a separate waste stream to be attractive for resale. Paper companies are also looking for ways to bring down costs in postconsumer collection. The production of paper from postconsumer waste does create some environmental contamination during deinking (or pulp laundering) and reprocessing, but studies have found that overall energy requirements, production of greenhouse gases, solid waste, and particulates are less in 100 percent recycled paper than in 100 percent virgin paper. There are global environmental campaigns pressuring companies to increase postconsumer pulp in paper products, and for consumers to purchase recycled products.

Bibliography:

Datamonitor, Global Paper and Forest Products (May 2005);
Emily McNair, Following the Paper Trail: Overcoming Market Barriers to Environmentally Preferable Paper (Aurora Institute, 2003);
“Pulp Market Braces for Latin American Capacity Surge,” Pulp and Paper (v.7517, 2005);
Rennel and S. Dillen, “Pulp and Paper: Wood Sources,” in Encyclopedia of Materials: Science and Technology (Elsevier Science, 2001);
S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Fact Sheet: The Pulp and Paper Industry, the Pulping Process, and Pollutant Releases to the Environment” (November 1997).