On Paper
Alarmists like to wring their hands and cry that we're running out of trees.
Can they be right? By Bill Vaughn

WHENEVER THE WORK feels flat and there’s nothing good on the dish we flee the shop, saddle the horses, and take off through the cottonwood brakes crowding the river to a logged-out drainage we call the Shredded Forest. Our snappish beasts don’t much care for the shadow and tangle along the way. They spook at every fleeing bird and crunching stick and scan the canopied path ahead with a giddy vigilance that make us wonder if they think it conceals mountain lions or buyers from Ralston-Purina. They never relax till we reach the clearcuts, where the sun floods down and they can see trouble coming from a quarter-mile away.

But for me the Shredded Forest is an anxious place. It was cut to the quick two decades ago when the pine pigs descended on these private lands of western Montana for a corporate feeding frenzy some people believe has seriously damaged the soil. When we first began riding up here this ruin made me feel guilty, a distant relative of the remorse a pilot might feel visiting a city on which his bombs once rained down. After all, the books, newsletters and catalogs we design are printed on paper, and paper is made from wood, and there’s no mistaking the fact that from the Shredded Forest we can look down on the Smurfit-Stone plant, one of the biggest paper mills in the West.

In the middle of the Shredded Forest is a gargantuan stump, the gravestone of a white pine big enough to serve as the spar of a classic sailing ship. In these two hundred cracked and weathered rings is a record of patient, careful accumulation, each ring like an entry in the passbook of a tight-fisted shopkeeper. The purpose of the mill in the valley below, like the purpose of paper mills everywhere, is to convert the vertical wealth of a tree into the horizontal strength that makes paper one of the most versatile and useful substances we use.

To witness close up the mayhem required to do this always takes my breath away. First, the tree is cut down, dragged through the forest and heaved on a truck with gigantic pincers. Then it’s skinned and shattered into chips the size of my thumbnail. The chips are cooked into a pulp using steam and chemicals that dissolve the organic glues called lignins that bind the strongest strands of cellulose together. Then the pulp is bleached and rinsed and played out onto perforated drums that suck out the moisture. Finally, it’s baked and flattened in a series of presses and calendars, and wound into rolls.

Like the medieval castles peasants built their squalor around, this enormous rumbling machine two miles upwind from our house is never far from our thoughts. Day and night, twelve months a year, it pushes at our senses with its hiss and throb and smell. Freights clatter to it across the valley floor delivering toxins, hardware, and raw material, and clatter back with valuable rolls of product bound for market. On wet nights the sky for miles around glows with colors not found in Nature, as hundreds of lights from this surreal behemoth play against the clouds generated by the bellicose multi-story boilers that incinerate recovered lignins for steam. Sometimes the mill generates its own weather, rain or snow or even ice pellets from these clouds on cold days when the environs are cloudless. 

ON A GOOD DAY when demand is strong our mill will consume enough pine to fill 200 logging trucks and produce 2500 tons of paper worth $600 a ton to wholesale customers in Guadalajara, Tokyo and Dallas.

When I compare the mill’s voracious appetite for trees to the languid 70-year growth to maturity of a single pine in this cold, dry country coated with frail, skinny soil, I have to wonder how soon our careers as designers must change because there won’t be any more trees to make paper on which to print our designs.

Such is the sort of paranoia that can arise when all you’ve got is circumstantial evidence. I started learning some true questions and answers about the increasingly complicated and international paper industry when we took on the mill as a client. I wrote and shot photos for one of their newsletters, and Kitty designed it. What I liked most about this work was the hardhat they gave me. Second best was talking to people in the paper industry about their fave topic. Third best was wandering around inside the fever dream that's a paper plant, mind-bending noise, miles of pipes full of hot sulphur compounds, Dante's idea of Hell. The Smurfit-Stone mill is one of the most important employers in Missoula County, pays the most property taxes, and excretes more pollution than any other source except for the rest of us, who drive gas-burners.

But it doesn’t make anything resembling the fancy coated stock most designers adore. Its sole product is rough kraft linerboard, the stiff, brown paper that’s made into grocery bags and corrugated boxes (Kraft, which means “strength” in German, is the name for the manufacturing process, which uses chemicals to pulp the fiber.)

Not only does the mill not make shiny designer paper, the Shredded Forest was cut for lumber, not pulp. And even with timber harvests in the Northwest severely reduced due to unchecked greed, the U.S. is in no danger of running out of paper in most futures we can envision. The reason has to do with the move of the American paper industry to the South and overseas for its raw materials, the rise of international pulp plantations, the popularity and profits of recycling, the development of the electronic office, the burgeoning business of paperless publishing, the rise of the Web, and the birth of a boutique industry that sells paper made without trees.

Paper manufactured from wood is only a footnote in the history of the written word. For millenia the rulers of the ancient world used stone, brass, copper, and even lead to preserve official histories. The oldest literate record are Sumerian tablets from 6000 years ago bearing a cuneiform language made by indenting the wet clay with a bone. Papyrus was extensively circulated in the kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia as long ago as 3000 B.C.The Greeks ad Romans made books from wooden boards with a wax or plaster coating into which manuscripts were inscribed. Parchment and vellum, the scraped and seasoned skin of livestock, was used to bookmaking until well into the 20th Century.

As with so many other transcendental leaps forward, it was probably the Chinese who invented the first true paper. At some point after their Asian neighbors invented felt, some prescient wit saw that vegetable fibers could be bound together in the same way that strands of animal hair are pounded into mats. Traditional lore has it that a court official named Ts’ai Lun revealed a kind of paper to Emperor Ho-ti in 105 A.D. concocted from fish nets, tree bark, rags and hemp.

HEMP MAY HAVE BEEN INCIDENTAL in Ts’ai Lun’s recipe, but it has played a significant role in the history of paper. Although hemp cultivation is illegal in Corporate America, it was against the law for farmers in Colonial America not to grow it. Cannabis has always been valued by horticultural societies for its use in medicines, sail-making, rope-making, textiles, cooking oils, nutrition, and paper. The outer layers of marijuana stems—the bast—make a tough, durable paper that can be finished into a creamy, luscious sheet with addition of some shorter, softer fibers such as those from wood or cotton. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, penned the original draft of the Declaration of Independence on paper made from hemp. Along with cotton rags, hemp had been the pulp of choice in the New World ever since the first paper mill began production near Mexico City in 1575. The U.S. industry can trace its roots back to 1690 and a Philadelphia mill in the middle of the Colonial hemp belt.

The beginning of the end for domestic hemp was the Spanish-American War of 1898, one of the hobbies of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. His New York Post created a public hysteria around the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and escalated this fever into a nasty international bloodbath. The Post soon began publishing caricatures of Mexicans as hopped-up hemp-heads. Here Hearst simply substituted the Mexican slang “marijuana” for hemp to associate Hispanics with wantonness. Hearst’s anti-hemp campaign grew seriously racist in 1910 after Pancho Villa confiscated significant tracts of the publisher’s land holdings in northern Mexico (which, coincidentally, were used to grow trees for newsprint) as part of his struggle to wrest land from the rich and give it to the poor, enriching himself along the way, of course. Finally, in 1937, enough pressure had been brought to bear on Congress to convince lawmakers to sock a dollar-an-ounce tax on the sale of hemp, effectively destroying what had been a thriving industry in America for three centuries.

Hemp’s decline mirrored wood’s ascendance. Influenced by the way wasps built their nests, experiments using wood to make commercial paper had begun in the early 1800s. In 1840 a machine was patented that could grind wood into fibers (a different process than making kraft pulp), and a year later the first wood-based paper in the western hemisphere was manufactured in Nova Scotia. Important quantities of wood-based paper, however, didn’t hit the market until the mid-1800s, after the bugs in endless-belt paper machines such as the Fourdrinier press were worked out, and chemical methods to pulp wood became economical. United States now produces and uses a third of the world's paper.

The United States produces and consumes a third of the world’s paper. In 2009, 168 years after the first sheet of wood-based paper in North America was sold, the U.S. will consume at least 80 million tons. That’s a number only a bureaucrat could love. To grasp such a figure you need to lead your spousal unit, as our bureaucrat might say, and your two offspring from your single-family dwelling to your two-vehicle detached garage. Open the door, look inside, and use your imagination. There, packed from floor to ceiling, taking up more than half your garage, are all the stacks of books, magazines, junk mail, newspapers, coffee filters, shipping tubes, beer cartons, toilet paper, cellophane, and origami flamingos your family unit will use up this year. There’s more than 2,600 pounds of paper sitting there, probably all of it fabricated from trees. (However, this mass isn’t growing from year to year, it’s shrinking—especially in the current world-wide recession. Fifteen years ago Americans consumed 84 million tons of paper). 

If you were to paw through this mass you'd find, sandwiched between the cardboard packaging and the newspaper, a small bundle of currency, mostly ones, fives, and twenties, made of paper manufactured from cotton, a fiber that once constituted, with hemp and velum, almost the entire U.S. output of paper. There would also be perhaps a map printed on a petroleum-based paper such as Kimdura. This is a medium I once believed could be used to make books waterproof, and me rich. I figured I would publish public-domain works of fiction on it and sell these tomes to people who like to read in the tub. I abandoned this scheme when someone pointed out that the only people who spend enough time in hot water to need a waterproof book are the Japanese, or maybe Icelanders, both countries of which have in fact have been publishing books on this material.

You might also find a sheet or two of paper-grade Tyvec, that white synthetic used to wrap houses and fabricate industrial garments such as painter's jump suits. When milled for printing Tyvec bonds readily with special inks and offers a non-glare surface that produces a clear, sharp image. Even printers such as Kinkos is now offering Tyvec as standard stock for laser-jet reproduction.

But you'd find that more that half of the paper in your garage is paperboard, the stuff animal crackers containers and shoeboxes are made from, and linerboard, the corrugated boxes in which these smaller boxes are shipped. (Americans like things to put other things into as much as we like the things themselves. Another 400 pounds of the mass in our garage is newsprint, a sum that's declining due to the shrinking size of newspapers and the rise of Web-only papers.

Yes, a lot of trees died to make this paper. But more than forty percent of it was recycled from mill scraps, unused paper inventories, and material that had been printed, returned to the mill, de-inked, repulped , and made into useful paper again.

The American Forest and Paper Association says that in 2007 more than 56 percent of the paper manufactured in the U.S. was recycled. So it seems Americans have gotten the message about recycling, seeing in it a way to respond personally to the polarized debate about global deforestation, and to the arguments about the increasing American reliance on imports and the shrinking capacity of landfills. This private consciousness has prompted public action such as the Federal government's requirement that its purchasers buy recycled paper, and its contractors who pay more than $10,000 a year for paper to buy recycled product for the portion that is used to fulfill government contracts. 

Publication designers, America's great Levelers of Forests, have embraced certain kinds of recycled stock not necessarily because of guilt but because of the paper's appearance. Those nutritious-looking flecks of “post-consumer waste” give writing and printing stocks some of the tactile sensations that currency paper offers, and all that visible fiber seems somehow wholesome and good, like oatmeal. Some publications are joining the recycling movement by changing from shiny coated stock to supercalendered paper—uncoated stock hypercompressed between heavy metal rollers that forge a sheet whose surface has been compacted into a smooth, glossy finish that retards dot gain, the tendency of inks to spread slightly through the fibers, thus dulling the sharpness of an image. Supercalendered paper is easily recycled; high-gloss stock coated with the clays that give it its lustre much less so.

Recycling itself isn’t a panacea because it’s not a continuous loop. According to Deborah Dietsman at the Federal Forest Laboratory in Wisconsin, paper can be reused only six or seven times before the length of its fibers moves too far in the direction of zero. Still, companies such as Smurfit-Stone, whose Missoula mill began recycling corrugated containers way back in 1990, understood early that the worldwide demand for boxes was going to increase, and decided to get in on the ground floor. These days, even during the global recession, trainloads of OCC (Old Corrugated Containers) arrive at the mill’s recycling plant at every hour of the day and night from Canada and the U.S. This stream of fiber significantly increased when retailers were offered a small bailing machine that allowed them to gather their used boxes for recycling on site rather than bearing the expense of shipping them to a recycling center. (When we were produced the mill’s newsletter one of these trains brought a stowaway from the Midwest, a raccoon that became a mascot for the recycling mill’s workers, eventually so tame it ate treats from their hands). The OCC mill produces more than 17,000 tons of recycled material a month, a commodity worth around $100 a ton.

[read more tomorrow or maybe the next day]