The following article about a Seattleite's typical daily newspaper was condensed from one chapter of the book Stuff: the Secret Life of Everyday Things. For more information, or to obtain the complete book, contact Northwest Environment Watch

I put down my coffee to find the morning paper somewhere in my front yard. It was in the bushes again.

Trees. The paper was half recycled and half made from trees. Most of the trees were 150-year-old Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir trees in the Cariboo Mountains of central British Columbia. Loggers, earning Can$20 (US$15) an hour, felled the trees from a steep slope above Penfold Creek. They were lucky to have jobs. Many of their friends were laid off in the 1980s as machines did more of the cutting and processing.

Logging Roads. After the branches and treetops were sawed off, a choker-setter in a hard hat attached cables to the trees, and a diesel-powered yarder dragged them up the hillside to a muddy landing area, leaving a "skid trail" on the slope. Mud and rocks tumbled toward the creek. The logs were loaded on an 18-wheel flatbed truck. The driver steered his load over dirt logging roads that twisted and turned through the mountains like so much spaghetti. He made his way to a sawmill in Quesnel, a town beside the Fraser River. The Fraser is the world's greatest producer of salmon, but logging, road building, and other disturbance of the watershed have contributed to an 80 percent decline in salmon over the past century.

Pulp. The Quesnel mill sawed the logs. About half of each log was converted into lumber; the rest became chips and sawdust. these residues were trucked to a nearby pulp mill, where they were mixed with Fraser River water and cooked to make a pulp of weak, yellow fibers. Five percent of the newsprint in my morning paper came from another forest and was processed in a "kraft" pulp mill in Crofton, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. Kraft in German means "strength", and newsprint makers add kraft pulp to make their product stronger. The kraft pulp began as 300-year-old western red cedar and hemlock trees. Chips and dust from these trees were cooked in a soup of caustic soda and sodium sulfide. These chemicals are not especially toxic, but they give Crofton the rotten-egg aroma of a mill town.

Bleaching. The kraft pulp-brown like a paper grocery bag-was then bleached with chlorine dioxide. A tiny fraction of the chlorine reacted with organic chemicals in the pulp to form various dioxins and furans, among them TCDD and TCDF-two of the most carcinogenic substances known. Beyond causing cancer, dioxins can also suppress the immune system and produce severe birth defects and reproductive disorders in humans and other animals. European consumers' demands for totally chlorine-free paper, along with increasingly strict regulations in Canada on mill emissions, have led many mills to switch partially to making chlorine-free pulp. Some mills simultaneously produce chlorine-free paper for the European market and chlorine-bleached paper for the US market.

Recycling. From the mills in Quesnel and Crofton, the pulp was trucked to a paper mill in Spokane, Washington. The paper mill combined virgin pulp with recycled pulp-80 percent old newspapers and 20 percent old magazines. The truck had collected the papers curbside at homes in Spokane; the magazines were unsold copies returned from newsstands. Magazine publishers routinely print far more magazines than they sell; most go to landfills. To make the recycled pulp, blades churned old papers and magazines together in a tank of warm water and detergent. The ink adhered to air bubbles in the tank and rose to the surface, where machinery skimmed it off like cream. Because the recycling process weakens fibers, newsprint can be recycled only three or four times.

Printing. The mill in Spokane formed the paper and spun it into massive rolls, each four and a half feet wide and four feet across and weighing about a ton. An 18-wheeler hauled the rolls across the Cascades to a printing plant near downtown Seattle. High-speed presses printed the day's edition with black and color inks. The black ink was a mixture of petroleum-based resins and oils from California. The colored inks were about one-third soybean oil from Illinois, with small amounts of petrochemical pigments added. The inks were produced in Kent and Tukwila, industrial suburbs south of Seattle.

The newspaper came to my neighborhood in a gasoline-fueled station wagon. The paper was bound in a rubber band (made in Hong Kong from petroleum) and wrapped in a clear sheath of low-density polyethylene plastic from New Jersey. I saved the rubber band and threw out the bag. I scanned the front section, read a few comics, and dropped the paper in my recycling bin.

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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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