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National Environment Sustainability Plan 2006-2010 (Newsprint)

Background: A unique partnership

Fifteen years ago, the Australian newspaper industry created a unique partnership with Australia’s newsprint manufacturer. The concept was to create a new market for old newspapers and to give continuing industry support for it, to foster and encourage the development of the emerging kerbside recycling system through direct involvement in the market and to stimulate community interest in and involvement in kerbside recycling.

Seventy per cent of newsprint used in Australia is produced here, in paper mills in Albury, NSW and Boyer Tasmania. In 1990 the mills were owned by Australian Newsprint Mills which was owned equally by major newspaper publisher News Limited and by New Zealand’s newsprint manufacturer, Fletcher Challenge Limited.

At this time the only significant domestic market for re-use of old newspapers was the cardboard manufacturing industry which used the paper to supplement its supplies of wood fibre.

News Limited and Fletcher Challenge, as joint owners of Australian Newsprint Mills, decided to invest in a plant to recycle recovered old newspapers, based at Albury at the paper mill, roughly half way between the two biggest population centres of Sydney and Melbourne. By the time it was fully operational as a world-class de-inking operation in 1995, the partners had invested $135,000,000.

There was no pressing financial or technical reason to build the plant.

For the producer, fibre for newsprint making was plentiful and reasonably priced, being the thinnings from normal forestry management in plantations in southern NSW, northern Victoria and Tasmania. These forests are harvested primarily for sawlogs for the housing and joinery industries. The residue from harvesting of those plantations is used to make newsprint. No forests were (or are now) being destroyed to make newsprint. No old growth eucalypt has been used to make Australian newsprint since 1991.

For the publishers, having de-inked fibre from recovered newspapers (and magazines) in their newsprint was a completely unknown quantity, raising questions of reduction in strength, colour and opacity.

But it made environmental sense. The Australian community, stimulated by the Federal Government’s Industry Commission’s 1990 national inquiry into recycling with forums in each State capital, was starting to see that recycling could be more comprehensive than the old Boy Scout bottle drives and suburban aluminium can drop off points.

Also in 1990, News Limited had garnered wide publishing industry support for the creation of a new body to be called the Publishers National Environment Bureau (PNEB), bringing together the major companies in Australia’s publishing industry to support, encourage and promote the recovery and reuse of old newspapers.

To underwrite the viability of newspaper recycling, publishers agreed to long term contracts for newsprint containing recycled fibre, subject to normal cost and quality issues. As noted earlier, newsprint with recycled fibre was at that time an unknown—untried and untested—quantity, but the investment in the future was made.

Now, with this huge capital outlay undertaken, the newsprint manufacturer and the publishers had to create a guaranteed flow of recovered newspapers. This was done by:

The manufacturer setting up a company called Kerbside Papers to stand in the market at fixed prices and offer long-term contracts to Local Councils and collectors for recovered newspaper, and
The publishers, through the PNEB, creating an Interim Support Fund. The publishers contributed $2million a year for the three years leading up to the commissioning of the de-inking plant to support initiatives that expanded and underpinned the recovery and re-use of newspapers.

This $6million was made available to any undertaking or project endorsed by the Commonwealth and State environmental agencies and went to Local Government, State Governments, researchers and private firms. Over 100 projects have been supported. For example, the use of old newspaper to produce fibre for home insulation was developed with PNEB funding.

The publishers also encouraged community involvement in kerbside recycling by making available to the Commonwealth and State Governments $1million worth of advertising space free each year to promote newspaper recycling and by spending $100,000 each year producing and supplying education materials on recycling to schools and Local Councils throughout Australia.

The result of this unique and ongoing partnership and its voluntary Plans under the Environment Protection and Heritage Council’s precursor, the Australian New Zealand Environment Conservation Council, has been world class with newspaper recycling rates in at the start of 1990 of 28 per cent being completely turned around to achieve 74.5 per cent in 2004.