More sustainable production

Sustainable forests

Australian newsprint making is a good example of sustainable paper production. In Australia, trees are not cut down specifically to make newspapers. In fact, newsprint is made from mostly waste paper and waste timber. The pulp for making newsprint comes from:

De-inked old newspapers and old magazines that have been collected for recycling (20 - 40%);
Forest thinnings - which are branches and small trees removed from plantations to make room for the growth of timber used in housing and construction;
The residue when mature plantations are harvested for timber for housing and construction, and
Saw mill offcuts - which are the leftover branches, bark and pieces of wood from making sawn timber.

The pine plantations involved are sustainably managed and regrown especially for the manufacture of sawn timber and paper products. It takes 2.5 tonnes of radiata pine materials to make one tonne of newsprint. Because the material is a by-product of timber production, it makes no sense to say that a certain number of trees are used to produce a tonne of newsprint.

No old growth eucalypt has been used in Australian newsprint manufacture since 1990.

The Inks

The production process also uses environmentally friendly inks as they have no added heavy metals and contain either vegetable oils produced from crops like soya beans and canola, or non-hazardous mineral oils of very high purity. Most inks actually use a mixture of these two types of oil. Oils comprise about 50% of newspaper ink - the rest is made up of pigment, resins and solvents.

After being used on newspapers, our inks have a second life. The ink and paper fibre residue resulting from the de-inking process is dried to create a substance looking somewhat like breakfast cereal.

Sustainable Production Plants

To save resources and reduce waste, our newspaper publishers have established waste reduction measures within their own plants to reduce the amount of newsprint used in the production of newspaper. Some of these measures include reducing the basis weight of the newsprint, increasing the size of the paper reels to reduce wastage, improved transport methods which reduced the damage to reels and monitoring of circulation trends to reduce the number of unsold copies.