Kansas Green Teams
Friday Facts
www.kansasgreenteams.org
Paper Facts
Types of Paper To Be Recycled
Cardboard: All types of cardboard including food cartons, except for wax coated boxes or contaminated boxes.
Mixed Paper: All types of paper, everything you can imagine from magazines, junk mail to packaging.
Newspapers: The entire newspaper including inserts are acceptable, except for things like plastic, product samples and
rubber bands.
White Paper: Acceptable are clean white sheets from the likes of laser printers and copy machines.
With any type of recycled material, please check with your recycler for the most current method or process.
Contaminants
If any of your recycled paper has been contaminated with the following they cannot be recycled, food, metal closures,
tapes, glues, adhesives, rubber bands, glass, aluminum, and/or plastic packaging.
Can Paper Continue To Be Recycled?
Each time paper is recycled, the fiber length decreases which impacts its strength. Papermaking fibers can typically be re-
cycled 5-7 times before they become too short to be recycled again.
Resource
PaperRecycles.org
has a ready to create poster for you to use in your paper recycling program. Just enter your name and
state, what size you want, click submit and print
.
Dissemination of [Friday Facts/Other publications] by the Kansas Department of Health and Environ-
ment, a governmental agency, is solely for the non-commercial purpose of informing and educating
the public on important environmental issues. Any use of copyrighted material in [Friday Facts/Other
publications] is inadvertent and unintentional.
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Every day, U.S. papermakers recycle enough paper to fill a 15 mile long train of boxcars.
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The first paper merchant in America was Benjamin Franklin, who helped to start 18 paper mills in Virginia and sur-
rounding areas.
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During the American Revolution, paper was so hard to find that soldiers ripped pages from books to use them as wad-
ding for their rifles.
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In 2008 the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 340 pounds for each man, woman, and child in the
United States
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The paper industry has set a 60 percent recovery goal for 2012.
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There are over 500 paper mills in the United States, 75 percent of paper and paperboard mills used some recovered
paper and 132 mills used only recovered paper.
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Every ton of paper that is recovered saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
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In 2008, a record-high 57.4 percent of paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling.
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Approximately 62 percent of the paper recovered for recycling in the U.S. is used domestically and 35 percent of re-
covered paper was exported to overseas markets. The remainder was used to make other non-paper products.
Paperrecycles.org
