Recycled Board Production Posts Sharp Drop

The production of recycled paperboard continues to slump. Recent figures from the American Forest and Paper Association report that production of the grade over the first five months of the year dropped 5.6 percent from figures the same time last year. The total for this year stands at 6.81 million tons.

As disappointing as the drop is, total paperboard production dropped an even sharper 8.2 percent between the two years. The continued problems with the paper industry has been plaguing the overall forest products industry through this year.

Each of the three recycled board sectors reported declines between last year and this year. Recycled linerboard production dropped 7.8 percent over the first five months of this year. The drop was greater than total linerboard production, which declined by 7.4 percent between the two years.

Recycled corrugated medium also declined between last year and this year. For 2001, total production dropped 3.6 percent. Although a decline, total corrugated medium production dropped a much sharper 12.6 percent between the two years.

The final component of the recycled board industry, boxboard, posted a drop of 5.4 percent between the two years. The drop was sharper than the overall boxboard production figure, which posted a 4.4 percent drop between the two years.

The steady drop in production of these grades points to the overall difficulties being seen with the paper industry. Demand in North America, Europe and Asia have all been slumping over the past several quarters.

As demand for the finished products continue to dip, downtime has been cropping up throughout the supply network in the United States. Over the past several months a slew of board mills have opted to take downtime to remove excess capacity from the market.