Increased U.S. wastepaper recycling: the effect on timber demand

Abstract

Roughly 47 million metric tons (MMT) of paper and paperboard are disposed of annually in the U.S. as solid waste, an amount constituting about 35% (by weight) [ 1 ] of the materials entering landfills. Motivated largely by concerns over landfill capacity, governments at all levels in the U.S. are moving to promote increased recycling as an alternative to solid waste disposal. The most obvious of these is local government operation or subsidy of recycling programs, using one or both curbside pickup or drop-off centers. These, along with landfill taxes and related recycling incentives, are supply side policies intended to increase the supply of wastepaper for recycling. Demand side policies are those which have as their goal the augmentation of the demand for wastepaper and recycled paper. Important among these is procurement provisions, which require minimum percentages of recycled fiber in paper purchased by governments and their contractors [2 ]. Also on the demand side, several states have mandated minimum recycled fiber content in newsprint, and others are considering similar legislation, including taxes on virgin wood fiber use as paper pulp [ 3 ]. In addition to the landfill problem, a strong motivating force in the case of paper recycling is the desire to reduce the utilization of virgin wood fiber as a means of preserving forests. The tacit assumption or assertion that recycling saves trees and will presumably result in a larger forest stock (see e.g., [4] ), suggests the importance of examining the relation between recycling and wood fiber use. A long term projection by the U.S. Forest Service [ 5 ] estimates that an increase in the recycled fiber utilization rate (recycled pulp as a share of total paper pulp) from 21 to 39% will cut the total demand for forest products by only 3.7 percent. In a separate study [6] the same recycling increase is