When did it become possible to recycle shredded paper?

When did paper recycling start?

Recycling is not a late-20th century concept. Societies have always re-used, recycled, upcycled and extended the life of hard-to-obtain resources and difficult-to-manufacture products, with paper ranking highly among them.

Some of the earliest recorded recycling, for example, was the Ancient Roman palimpsest, a practice which involved scraping ink and text from expensively produced parchment and animal hide to re-use the surface for new writings. It was a practice that burgeoned in Europe from the fifth century onwards, reaching its height during the medieval period. Who knows how many ancient texts and treatises were lost!

When did commercial paper recycling programmes begin?

Paper recycling as a business practice gained momentum following on from the shortages of raw materials experienced, globally, during the Second World War. During the 1950s and the associated post-war recovery and birth of consumer culture, those de-inking and pulping technologies that had been invented a century or so beforehand could now be employed on a large scale to quickly process and recycle post-consumer and commercial wastepaper, such as newspaper, ledgers and cardboard.

From the 1970s onward, demands for environmental protections arose from growing awareness of the impacts of deforestation, pollution and the perils of landfill, with paper recycling being a highly achievable corporate goal.

What are the challenges of commercial paper waste management?

With the arrival of the Information Age in the mid-20th century, and its technologically-enhanced acceleration from the 1990s onwards, the need to protect data – commercial secrets, financial and corporate information, individuals’ confidential data, and so on – moved to occupy centre stage.

This need to consider data protection poses a major challenge for commercial paper waste management. It’s simply not right to throw away company wastepaper without considering consequences, and we now have the legislation to back this up in the shape of Simpler Recycling and GDPR.

The challenges of successfully managing your business’ wastepaper, then, need to include considerations surrounding both data protection and environmental protection. These considerations, that should be company best practice, need to embrace company-wide education, volume management, secure storage, and an ironclad guarantee of recycling, if that management is to comply with our national and international regulations.

What are the challenges for businesses of recycling paper shreds?

One of the seemingly most effective ways of disposing of confidential paper waste is to reduce it to small shreds with specialist shredding equipment. If a member of your team is made responsible for ensuring all sensitive data is correctly controlled and handled in office and then shredded, this can appear to answer the ‘data protection’ element of compliance with GDPR.

The ‘environmental protection’ element, however, is problematic. If paper shreds are disposed of via the workplace recycling stream collected by your local authority, there is the strong risk of contamination occurring across other recyclable materials, of individual shreds causing equipment jams at their recycling facility or simply falling on to the floor – a GDPR risk, too – at the facility and being swept up as rubbish. In short, the density/volume of paper shreds causes issues for standard waste streams and many local authorities have strict rules in place about separating paper shreds into separate (recyclable) bags, or refuse them altogether.