Even in an increasingly digital world, we all still rely on paper. It’s more critical in some industries than others. Your business might be able to adjust to a temporary shortage of printer paper by printing essential items only, but a newspaper publisher can’t function without an adequate supply of newsprint, and that’s exactly the situation American newspapers have been struggling with in early 2022. Publishers have been affected by delayed newsprint shipments all around the country. Some small papers have even had to cancel deliveries or condense their issues to stretch out a dwindling supply of newsprint. It’s just one of many shortages that has shaken the paper market since the global supply chain issues started.
What’s responsible for recent paper shortages?
The paper recycling and production industries have been affected by the same staffing and transportation challenges that have plagued everyone since early 2020. There’s a complicated mix of factors to blame.
For one, the shipping container crisis. When quarantine began and everyone started doing a lot more online shopping, it became lucrative for shipping carriers to empty containers of Chinese goods at American ports and then rush the containers back across the Pacific to be refilled and shipped back. This strategy left American exporters competing for limited space on ships, sending shipping prices through the roof and leaving ports clogged with exports that had no place to go. Shipments of American recyclables that were bound for developing nations (including material collected by paper recycling companies, as well as plastic and metal exports) lost space to shipments of more valuable goods. It also became more logistically challenging, and expensive, for American importers to get shipments of paper and components for making paper from foreign manufacturers.
The rise in e-commerce also shot up demand for packing materials. In response, many American paper mills shifted their focus to producing cardboard instead of paper. The demand for paper didn’t slow down but suddenly there was less of it being produced, hence shortages.
European consumers have also been scrambling for paper supply in 2022, after workers at UPM’s paper mills in Finland went on strike on January 1. UPM is the world’s largest producer of graphic paper, a category that includes printer paper and newsprint. And it’s not just European customers who were affected by the strike, because UPM produces about 7% of the global supply of graphic paper and its Finnish mills account for one-third of its production. The strike lasted 110 days before a settlement was reached in April.
As for the recent American newsprint shortage specifically, part of the supply problem stems from the fact that the majority of American newsprint comes from Canadian paper mills. The three-week blockade created by Canadian truckers protesting COVID restrictions in early 2022 slowed American Forest & Paper Association, and has consistently been above 63 percent since 2009 down the delivery of Canadian goods to the U.S., so shipments of newsprint that were bound for American newspapers got stuck behind the border.
Paper recycling during the pandemic
When the demand for paper is so high, paper recycling is more important than ever. American paper mills need that recovered paper fiber in order to churn out recycled paper.
The shift to remote work forced non-essential organizations to do things virtually, which meant a lot of business’ recycling bins sat empty for months. Despite the major disruption to the way people normally worked, paper recycling didn’t significantly slow down during the first year of the pandemic. Paper continues to be the most commonly recycled material in the U.S. The paper recycling rate was 65.7 percent in 2020, according to the American Forest & Paper Association, and has consistently been above 63 percent since 2009. (Remarkably, only 33.5 percent of paper was recycled in 1990.)
Cardboard is especially likely to be recycled. Between 2018 and 2020, the average cardboard recycling rate was 92.4 percent. That high recycling rate is largely due to retailers like grocery stores working with recycling companies to dispose of large quantities of cardboard.
Miller Recycling provides a full range of business recycling services, including plastic, metal and paper recycling. We also keep our customers informed about developments in the recycling industry. If you need help streamlining your business’s recycling processes, contact me today!