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Post It Notes Are Blocking RecyclingPost It Notes Are Blocking Recycling
For the paper industry, the consequences have been serious. Four giant recycling mills - in West Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and Maine - out of seven that have been built since 1994 have shut down. A dozen mills are operating at partial capacity. Altogether, recycling mills have defaulted on more than $1 billion in bonds and bank loans.
Recyclers have also been hit by falling prices and weak demand for recycled paper, but the main culprit in the mills' decline has been what insiders call the "stickies problem," the unexpected technical difficulties in removing self-sticking materials from office paper.
Because of stickies, there has been no increase in the percentage of stationery, envelopes and junk mail that gets recycled. Only about 35% of such refuse is recycled, a level that has been constant since 1994. And most of that is converted into low-quality paper such as tissue.
Stickies affect only the efforts to recycle writing paper. The percentage of newsprint, the paper that USA TODAY and other newspapers use, that gets recycled has climbed steadily over the years to 63% in 1996.
Stickies cost the industry $650 million a year, largely in unrecyclable paper, says Elizabeth Seiler, senior director of recycling at the American Forest & Paper Association. "The industry has invested enormous resources in the stickies problem, but technology hasn't caught up," she says.
The expensive new mills were supposed to be state-of-the-art, using equipment from Europe to deal with stickies. But the new technology didn't didn't filter out stickies as well as expected.
When the mills' losses began piling up, a "stickies summit" was held last year in Washington, D.C., to bring together recyclers, adhesive makers, the postal service and others.
"The best way to solve this problem is at its source: Change the way stickies are made," says Said Abubakr, head of stickies research at the U.S. Forest Service.
He recently tested 20 new stickies formulas developed by the adhesive industry. Five of those seem suitable to recycling. His standard: more than 90% of the adhesive must be removed during recycling vs. only 50% under current formulas. He expects that some environmentally safe stickies will be available next year.
"We need to solve this problem, among others, because 52 million tons of paper still end up in the landfills," Abubakr says. That is roughly half of all paper used annually in the U.S.
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
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