With government incentives and an overall movement to go green, recycling is currently experiencing new heights in popularity. Entire communities conduct recycling drives and many cities provide rebates to those citizens who sign up to recycle. One of the most obvious benefits of recycling is that less waste ends up in landfills and on the ground. Another large benefit is that new products are created from recovered recyclables. Paper is one of the most easily recycled materials, and it can be put to use in several ways.
Paper is a material that is often recycled into products that are very similar to the original model. Consider office document paper. It is made from a high grade stock that is used for printing paper, résumés, and the like. New office paper is made from these pieces because the fibers that comprise it are sturdy enough to handle multiple recycles. Newly manufactured sheets, however, obtain a darker shade than the original. Bleaching takes care of this, but it costs money to do so; therefore, recycled office paper is frequently used to make colored printing sheets. The colored dye covers up the dark shade and it ceases to be a problem.
Because paper fibers begin to break down in each ensuing use, many times paper is recycled into a lesser grade of paper. Newsprint is of a low enough grade, however, that it will not hurt to make more newsprint out of it. The resulting paper is not expected to be heavyweight material, so recycled newspapers often become more of the same. Other lower grade paper products that are recycled become tissues, napkins, and coffee filters.
Packaging materials such as cardboard are also made from low grade paper. Due to this, paper used in boxing often takes on the same form in subsequent recycling. Cardboard is very low grade paper, making it perfect for recycling into more cardboard products such as boxes. Boxes experience frequent handling and are meant to store objects. They aren’t necessarily meant to look pretty, so the resultant darker shade of recycled paper is unimportant. Manufacturing flaws are also not an issue if the box is meant to simply move freight from place to place. Cereal boxes are examples of cardboard that actually will be put on display, but the printing plastered all over the box hides dark shades and textual inconsistencies.
Recycling paper is easy to do. It can be placed in bins provided by the city or to collection bins outside of many establishments such as grocery stores. This enables a large amount of new paper products to be created from recycled paper.
