Page 16 from: December 2011
16 December 2011
Quality: ‘When will
the rope break?’
Whether it was the undoubted
attractions of the host city of
Barcelona or the demand for
greater clarity in the currently
cloudier market environment, the
latest Paper Recycling Conference
– Europe attracted a bumper
crowd, with some 250 names
featuring on the delegate list.
Recovered paper price predictions
and solutions to the parlous state
of Euro-zone finances were nota-
ble by their absence, but the
event certainly did provoke keen
discussion of some of the most
pressing issues facing the paper
recycling sector.
Quality has always been a focus of animat-ed debate at the Paper Recycling Confer-
ence – Europe. In common with previous
events, a number of paper and board industry
spokesmen expressed their concerns in Barce-
lona about the general decline in the standard
of recovered paper reaching their mills; how-
ever, at this latest gathering, there was also far
more emphasis on the fundamental and per-
haps more intractable issues and trends that are
undermining overall fibre quality.
Growth in the proportion of unwanted non-
fibre components found in recovered paper was
blamed in part on higher recovery rates by
Henri Vermeulen, Vice President of Recovered
Paper at Smurfit Kappa in the Netherlands.
Having noted that recycling levels in Europe
have leapt from around 50% to nearer 70% in
little more than a decade, the speaker observed:
‘Quality starts to get worse with a recovery rate
above 70%.’ And during attempts to remove this
larger volume of reject material, ‘a lot of good-
quality fibre is sorted out as well and is therefore
lost’, he explained. ‘So that hits you twice.’
Order of the day
Mr Vermeulen also highlighted concerns about
the influence of co-mingled collections and their
P A P E R By Ian Martin
Paper Recycling Conference – Europe 2011
potential to reduce quality. Even though the EU’s
Waste Framework Directive talks of conducting
separate collections when technically, econom-
ically and environmentally practicable, co-min-
gled collections have still become ‘the order of
the day’ in many countries, he lamented. At the
same time, said Mr Vermeulen, the industry is
suffering the impact of diminishing virgin fibre
volumes. As virgin-based production capacity
has been removed, fewer of these ‘crucial’ virgin
fibres have been flowing into the recovered paper
system. To make matters more difficult for pro-
ducers, the average weight of paper and board is
decreasing for design, sustainability and cost
reasons, and ‘lighter paper requires raw mate-
rial of a higher quality’.
Given that these trends are pulling in opposite
directions, Mr Vermeulen’s question for dele-
gates was: ‘When will the rope break?’ In other
words, he suggested, a point is approaching
when mills will no longer be able to produce
the paper demanded by the market with the
current recovered paper inflow.
Margins will suffer
Guillermo Valles Albar, Director of Materials
at the Spain-based Saica mill and recovered
paper group, echoed Mr Vermeulen’s concerns
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