| I'm not sure it's misconception. When I was a student a very long time ago on holidays I used to work in a paper mill in various departments laboratory and engineering departments, mechanical, instrumentation, electrical etc.
The UK paper making industry has (and had) been in decline for decades for many reasons but the main issue is cost, more specifically energy costs. Second to those costs were material resources. This paper mill was a recycling paper mill and the cost to produce acceptable standard paper was enormous. It used an enormous amount of gas to feed it's huge boilers producing steam, it even had it's own water turbine generators fed by the local river it was built alongside to produce electricity. It supplemented this with electricity from the grid which was even more expensive. It's biggest customer I'm fairly sure was McDonalds Pulp was shipped in from Norway because again it was cheaper, at that time 100% recycled paper was not profitable and pulp from the UK was too expensive. When the company went into administration most of it's equipment which was old even at that time was bought by companies from China. This mill was old, dating back to 1880 and it's infrastructure was part of the reason of it's demise. But there were 2 other paper mills in the same small town that eventually met the same demise, one being a much more modern construction, however it lasted longer by specialising in more profitable products such as tissue. The paper industry is not carbon efficient, it will be much more efficient than it used to be but it still takes a huge amount of energy to produce. In lower volume it could be but consumerism dictates it isn't, it's why China is the largest paper making country in the world now. I do have some fond memories working there even though it was hard work, at christmas time when the mill would shutdown it was absolutely freezing and doing a 12 hour shift on boxing day working inside a 5 storey high boiler was maybe not so pleasant. There were some wonderful quirks about the place, where the turbine generators were you could climb below the workshop floor where the bypass outflow was and you'd find one or 2 people sitting on wooden girders above the water fishing on their lunch break |