A report on the price of newspaper: zero
A paper mill in the central Canadian province of Manitoba is no longer accepting paper for recycling because the price of newsprint has dropped so low that it’s no longer cost effective to recycle…
Instead, the mill plans to simply cut down trees to make its paper. as more people read their news online, the price of newsprint to make papers has plummeted, Tembec said, and it’s cheaper to use new trees to make paper.
Some 200,000 more trees each year are now to be consumed by the mill, undermining arguments by electronic media that their operations save trees.
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But of course the Internet assures that newspapers will soon be obsolete, and so, then, will newsprint. Thus does advanced technology give new meaning to Thoreau’s famous dictum:
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”
Like trees.
Good, this whole recycling business is silly as there is a huge transportation cost of getting the newsprint back to the paper mill. The trees are local and land fills are local but Mills and Printers are not. So mills truck DENSE rolls of paper hundreds of miles to printers. And to make it even more efficient for the conversion of wood into paper, the mills use the left over wood stuff to generate power.
So the mill gets its energy from wood and there is a large loss of energy transporting UN-DENSE used newsprint back to the paper mill.
But Recycling makes us feel better about ourselves.
Yes, recycling makes me feel better about myself, but I’m also involved in a regional initiative to process municipal solid waste into energy and raw materials, driven by the economics of ever-rising landfill tipping fees and the diversion of these payments to a high-tech “SMART Park” (Sustainable Manufacturing, Agricultural, and Recycling Technologies).
After all, as the price of oil rises, transportation costs rise too, putting an increasing premium on “indigenous materials,” an endless and virtually untapped source of which is the massive amount of stuff we throw away.
Please explain:
1. People start reading their news on the internet and therefore less newspaper gets sold.
[Assuming a fixed ratio of wood to used paperl in the production of newspaper the demand for both should have dropped. So yes, online media reduced the use of wood for newspaper production so far.]
2. Following lower demand for newspaper, the price for unprint newspaper dropped and the paper mill found out that the cost of recycling had become higher than the cost of using new wood. So it stopped recycling, returning to the previous method of using just wood.
[When the demand of newspaper was higher the cost of wood was also higher and recycling was economical. Now this has changed.]
3. “Some 200,000 more trees each year are now to be consumed by the mill …”.
[Correct, the old paper previously being recycled must be replaced by wood. Wood consumption increases again. But consumption of wood should be far less than some years ago, when nobody read the news online, because else we would be back at the levels of previous demand and at the price of wood that made recycling cost effective in the first place.]
4. “… , undermining arguments by electronic media that their operations save trees.”
[I hope the sillyness of this conclusion could be demonstrated.]
The above reasoning and conclusions of course are pure speculation, because the necessary data is missing: development of newspaper demand over the past 20 years, development of production costs and prices for raw materials over the same period of time etc.).
So please explain what is really happening, and please be so kind to provide the neccessary data to enable your readers to follow the reasoning and evaluate your conclusions.
nemo:
What’s so difficult to understand? The demise of the newspaper industry is reducing the demand for newsprint, which is in turn lowering its price, making recycling uneconomical and thus increasing the near-term use of virgin wood. Accent on near-term, however, as the point will soon be reached where the industry’s demise translates into fewer and fewer tress being cut down, ultimately reaching the vanishing point so far as the need for newsprint is concerned.
Nemo, maybe you should leave that as a comment for the article linked?
Some 200,000 more trees each year are now to be consumed by the mill, undermining arguments by electronic media that their operations save trees.
Undermines arguments by mainstream media that government-driven recycling programs are anything other than a complete waste of time and energy.
At least we’ll sequester more carbon this way. Paper in landfills degrades very slowly.
Considering the preference of “Austrians” for an unhampered market, how could an Austrian take exception to this? Of the processes of production available for use at the paper mill, the most economical, considering the environment within which it operates and as concluded by the decision make, was selected. In other words, the most effective means to achieve the desired end was selected, at least from the decision maker’s point of view.
need more information to make sense of this story. why wasn’t new timber used all along? cost minimization doesn’t just kick in when sales revenue is under pressure.
there must be a sub-plot of subsidization or political suasion here, otherwise it just doesn’t compute.
need more information to make sense of this story. why wasn’t new timber used all along? cost minimization doesn’t just kick in when sales revenue is under pressure.
there must be a sub-plot of subsidization or political suasion here, otherwise it just doesn’t compute.
need more information to make sense of this story. why wasn’t new timber used all along? cost minimization doesn’t just kick in when sales revenue is under pressure.
there must be a sub-plot of subsidization or political suasion here, otherwise it just doesn’t compute.
The way the article phrases it–”it’s [now] cheaper to use new trees to make paper”–it seems like the relative costs (of recycling and of virgin wood) have changed, when really, it’s the relative selling prices (of newsprint and higher-quality paper) that have changed. Unless I’m being dense today (and I either still misunderstand it or I shouldn’t have misread it in the first place)…….
What a garbage post. The mill is upgrading to higher quality paper, so it can’t use old newsprint anymore. The newsprint is still going to be recyled, just at another facility somewhere nearby or maybe overseas. It’s called a free market. The pseudo-libertarians of the tax-exempt Mises Institute should try it some day.
Seems someone forgot “Post an intelligent and civil comment”…
Of course, it’d be the height of irony for a Catoite or any other such libertarian to refer to Misesians as pseudo-libertarians. A sure sign of a troll…
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