The climate change impact of office paper

Paper and board consumption causes 12% of man-made climate change gas emissions, making it somewhere between the 3rd and 5th most significant industry for climate change.1;2 European environment ministers want to reduce climate change gas emissions in the European Union by 6080% from 1990 levels by 2050.3 Since 1990, emissions from the European paper industry have grown: increased consumption has offset lower emissions per tonne.4 This trend could be reversed by: reducing consumption changing to carbon-neutral fuels improving the energy efficiency of each stage in the life cycle of paper cutting out stages in the life cycle of paper Reducing consumption has been investigated by Hekkert et al. 5 They predicted that consumption of office paper will increase at 5% a year in Europe between 1995 and 2015. They explored ways that the same needs could be met with less paper mass by: decreasing waste in the paper manufacturing process; decreasing waste in the printing process; reducing the average paper weight; good housekeeping in offices; more duplex printing and copying; reducing the proportion of paper that is printed but not read. They predicted that double sided printing and copying would have the greatest effect on cut-size paper. They estimated that using all these technologies would reduce the climate change gas emissions from office papers by 37% relative to their projection for 2015, but this would still represent a 74% absolute increase on 1995 emissions. A change to carbon-neutral fuels is already well underway in the European pulp and paper industry. Biomass is used to generate half of the primary energy used in pulping and paper-making.4 This has been achieved by using the waste wood and lignin from the pulping process to generate heat and electricity. Mannsbach et al. 6 analysed the potential for the Swedish chemical pulp industry to satisfy their entire power demand from biomass. They calculated that this could not be done by more efficient use of existing wood waste and lignin, but would be possible if extra biomass were to be supplied to the industry for use as a fuel. The third approach is to improve the energy efficiency of each stage of the pulping and paper-making processes. Martin et al. 7 analysed 45 technologies that do this and predicted that they would allow the energy efficiency of the US pulp and paper industry to be improved by 31% on 1994 levels.

To date, studies of cutting out stages in the life cycle of paper have focused on whether to cut out landfill and replace it with incineration or replace it with recycling. Surveys of this research, for example by Finnveden & Ekvall 8 and by Villanueva et al. 9 , have explored the disagreement about whether to incinerate or recycle paper. They show that significant factors in the decision between incineration or recycling are the mix of fuels that used by the paper industry and the mix of fuels that any energy created by incineration would be used to replace. There has not been a systematic comparison of the potential for climate gas reduction by cutting out transport through localising production, by cutting out forestry through the use of annual crops, by cutting out papermaking through the use of un-printing to allow paper to be reused or by cutting out the entire paper life cycle through the use of electronic paper. This chapter addresses two questions What stages in the life cycle of office paper could be cut out? and What would be the impact on energy and on emissions of climate change gases? The chapter focuses on cut-size paper used in office printers (introduced below). It does not analyse economic constraints nor environmental impacts other than climate change gas emissions. However, chapter 6 does consider the economics and wider safety considerations of the techniques discussed later in this thesis. A quantitative assessment of the impact of cutting out different stages in the life cycle is made, but the numbers are rough estimates based on secondary sources. The estimates are believed to be correct relative to each other but should not be considered as absolute predictions or equivalent to life cycle assessments. The sensitivity of the conclusions to likely sources of error is considered in section 1.6. The next section introduces office paper, the following section presents the typical stages in the life cycle of office paper together with the energy demand and climate change impact of each stage. Section 1.3 considers which stages could be cut out, section 1.4 analyses the potential impact on energy demand, section 1.5 examines the potential impact on climate change gas emissions and section 1.6 ranks the options and considers sources of error. The chapter ends by defining the subject and organisation of the remainder of this thesis.

The life cycle of a typical sheet of office paper The energy demand and climate change impact of the typical life cycle of cut-size office paper is illustrated in Figure 1.1 and discussed in this section. Cut-size office paper is formed principally from a web of fibres. These fibres are mainly cellulose, which is a glucose polymer of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The typical life cycle of office paper starts with carbon dioxide and water, which are converted by a tree into cellulose in its cell walls. The tree is felled, debarked, and pulped to separate the desired fibrous cells from the unwanted stiff lignin matrix that may constitute half a trees mass. For cut-size office papers the pulping process normally uses solvents to dissolve and remove the lignin. The un-dissolved fibres are then bleached to remove any remaining colour. The fibres are turned into paper by suspending them in water, pouring them over a fast moving mesh to form thin sheets, and then pressing and drying. In use most cut-size office paper is printed or used for photocopying. It is then typically thrown into a mixed waste bin and taken with that waste to a landfill site. In a modern landfill site paper tends to decompose slowly into methane. Once in the atmosphere the methane is slowly transformed back into carbon dioxide and water, completing the cycle. This is a description of the life cycle of the majority of paper mass but excludes the c. 15% of an office papers mass that may be additives such as clays, binders or whiteners. These are incorporated at the paper-making stage and remain in landfill. The description also excludes variation across location: in some areas paper may be incinerated or recycled and at some landfills a proportion of the methane released may be captured and burnt. These variations are not considered here but are discussed in the following sections within a broader analysis of stages in the typical cycle that can be cut out. The typical energy demand for each stage in the life of office paper has been drawn from existing literature and is shown in Table 1.1. The energy required to produce the chemicals used in pulping, to cut down and transport the trees, to transport materials and to finally print the paper has been incorporated. The solar energy used by the tree has been excluded. In practice the energy demand is likely to vary across products, across production sites and across time. The ratio of climate change impact to energy demand varies widely for each process step due to variations in the mix of fuel used and to non energy related greenhouse gas emissions. The largest differences between energy and climate change gas emissions

occur in the pulping and landfill stages. The relatively low climate change gas emissions from pulping occur because this process tends to be almost entirely powered by waste wood, which is assumed to be carbon neutral. The relatively high climate change gas emissions from landfill occur due to the decomposition of paper into methane in landfill. A survey by ncasi 21 suggests that greenhouse gas emission during paper decomposition in landfill is not entirely understood. A study by the us epa 19 suggests that office paper may release up to 398 ml of methane per dry gram of paper placed in landfill. The ipcc 22 estimate that methane is 23 times more potent in global warming potential than carbon dioxide over 100 years. Combining these data points gives the estimate used here which implies that landfill may contribute three quarters of the total climate change emissions of the typical paper life-cycle. The lowest value seen in the literature, from the Paper Task Force ,23 allocates half of the total climate change impact to the landfill stage, but does not incorporate the lower lignin content of most office papers and therefore the higher methane emissions (lignin tends to decompose to methane less readily). The impact of using the lower value is discussed in section1.6. Life cycle stages that could be cut out There are fewer differences between waste and fresh sheets of office paper than there are between carbon dioxide, water and fresh sheets. Therefore, there may be opportunities to cut out stages in the life cycle of office paper. A range of options for doing this have been proposed. The ones considered in this chapter are illustrated in Figure 1.2. They will be discussed in order of the number of stages that they eliminate. Incineration cuts out the landfill stage and transforms waste paper directly into carbon dioxide without passing through methane. In someWestern European countries up to 60% of municipal waste may be incinerated, much of it paper.24 Incineration involves a change to the way that waste is transported. The heat generated by the incineration may be captured and used. Localisation cuts transport by locating pulping and papermaking factories close to the point of paper consumption. The lack of forests close to urban centres means that localisation can rarely occur on its own, and is usually combined with a shift to a different fibre source,25 or to recycling.26 It should be noted that localisation does not necessarily mean small scale as, for instance, New York consumes as much paper as Canada.27 A shift to annual fibre cuts the need for forestry and replaces it with annual crops either with the waste from food crops such as wheat or with crops grown specifically for paper-making such as

Kenaf. Because these annual crops tend to contain less lignin, the scale of the pulping stage can be reduced. Transport may also be cut because annual crops tend to be grown nearer centres of population than wood tends to be. Annual fibres are used extensively for paper production in several countries, notably China. The pulping process may need adjustment, and new cleaning stages may need to be added to remove unwanted minerals from the crop. The amount of land used to grow the fibre may also vary. According to data from the iied 2 if Scandinavian hardwood is replaced by Hemp then the land area required might drop by a factor of five, while if a fast growing hardwood is replaced by wheat straw then the land area required might increase by a factor of three. The change in land area may have implications for the use of land for other climate change gas mitigation activities, but these implications are not considered further here. Recycling cuts landfill, forestry and pulping by reusing the fibres from waste paper in the paper-making process. In order to reuse the fibres in office paper new collection, sorting and de-inking stages may need to be added. Reusing office paper would cut out all the stages except printing. This would require the effects of use to be un-done and print to be un-printed. One commercial un-printing system, the Toshiba e-blue, is on the market.28 E-blue uses an altered toner formulation that becomes colourless when heated to 180!C for three hours. Electronic-paper cuts out all the stages in the typical paper life cycle and instead replaces many sheets of paper with a single electronic display. The displays of office computers and laptops have already replaced some use of office paper, particularly that used for archiving and communication purposes.14 More paper-like displays have recently come to market, such as the Sony Reader.