Paper producers beat the circularity drum

The descriptor "circular economy," with recycling at its core, has gained traction globally throughout the 21st century, with the European Union consistently taking steps to back it via policy measures.

As companies that make and use plastic packaging begin to invest to improve their recycling rates, producers of paperboard packaging—and the trade groups that represent them—have fired steady public relations salvos to call attention to the material’s already established recycling loops.

The Brussels-based Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) says European mills, even while making less overall product in an energy-starved 2022 business climate, consumed a higher percentage of Europe’s collected recovered fiber than in previous years.

CEPI says 96 percent of European paper for recycling was consumed by European paper and board mills. Exports of fiber were down by nearly 10 percent compared with 2021, “partly due to extended [COVID-19-related] lockdowns in Asia.”

Based in part on the European paperboard sector’s success in making recycled-content board, CEPI Director General Jori Ringman said earlier this year, “We are confident that a transition towards a greener economy is in the long-term an opportunity for the European paper industry.”

At the Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference Europe event in late 2022,  Ulrich Leberle, raw materials director at CEPI, referred to the high recycling and recycled-content rates of paper in Europe as a benefit in the wider packaging market.

“If we want paper to play a role [in the circular economy], we have to make sure it is a sustainable route for the brand owners and for the [household] consumer to go with,” Leberle said. “At the moment they like paper and are happy to see it as an alternative [to plastic], but that needs to be proven to show those benefits.”

In North America, similar sustainability and circular economy forces are shaping the messages broadcast by trade associations on that continent.

In August, the Canada-based Paper and Paperboard Packaging Environmental Council (PPEC) announced its most recent survey results, which indicate Canada’s containerboard packaging producers used recovered paper at an 81 percent rate last year.

“These latest results continue to validate the success of our industry’s circular economy in collecting and recycling paper-based packaging and ensuring they are remade into new products again and again,” says Chris Bartlett, board chair of the PPEC.

“With a recycled content rate of over 80 percent and confirmation that our boxboard and containerboard made in Canada is primarily recycled-content fibers, we are proud of the progress our industry has and continues to make.”

The Washington-based American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), meanwhile, posted a brief to its website in late August that refers to the United States forest products sector as “inherently circular” in its approach to its supply chain.

The trade group cites access to paper recycling, recycled content in paper and board and managed forestry practices as reasons it sees paper and paperboard as winners in the circular economy.

The circular model carried out by AF&PA member companies, the group says, is distinctive from “the traditional linear economy [which] follows the ‘take-make-dispose’ approach.”

“After use, packaging is collected and sent back to mills to be recycled. As this process comes full circle, the recycled paper is sorted and fed back into our manufacturing process to make new products,” AF&PA writes.

According to AF&PA, this business model matches what is called for by the London-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which defines the circular economy as “one that is restorative and regenerative by design and  aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles.”

“It’s a cycle that keeps going,” AF&PA writes in its brief. “Instead of throwing things away, we look for ways to make them useful again.”