Paper and board and the sourcing of these materials have once again reached the top of the agenda in terms of sustainability. There are a number of conflicting issues around paper, forestry and its manufacture - and there's no one "right answer" in terms of the top sustainability criteria.

Broadly speaking there are 2 extremes - 100% recycled materials (made from 100% recovered fibre, or 100% post consumer), and 100% virgin fibre (from 100% virgin paper pulp from felled trees). Between these 2 extremes most materials fall... with varying percentages of material making up the composition.

At KAP we have tended to use materials with 75% post consumer waste as a minimum by default as a good replacement for virgin fibre paper. We have used 100% materials when a customer really WANTS the print job to look recycled.

Virgin fibre materials can be sustainable, but the difficulty is in proving it. Forestry schemes such as FSC (the gold standard) and PEFC endeavour to provide a cast iron audit trail from tree to printed sheet, ensuring that illegally logged timber is not used for those cerified materials.

The issues with any virgin fibre materials are:-

• Proving that the material has come from sustainable sources
• That Ancient Forests have not been used
• That indigenous peoples have not been displaced
• That the product miles are reasonable

There are also issues with recycled materials:-

• People worry about the cost.power etc of recycling is actually worse than cutting down a tree
• There's a debate about "recovered fibre" and "post consumer" -i.e. is business waste, consumer waste?
• What happens to all the by products of recycling - some people worry
• Some people not clear that by BUYING recycled, you create a market for recycled goods. If no-one wanted recycled materials, then we'd be struggling to "pull through" material from waste collection.

For further details and discussion, please call us on 01634 844644 or Email us at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it