Tim Pankhurst: You can read a newspaper with a clear conscience

Photo / BOP Times

In the 1930s Depression, men were put to work planting pine trees on the central North Island volcanic plateau.

It is poor farming country but pinus radiata grows to maturity there in 25-30 years, one of the fastest rates in the world. The trees are a crop, just like wheat or apples, and are in their third or even fourth rotation in many areas.

The newspaper you are holding was made from those vast forests.

And most are recycled, returning to you in the form of egg cartons or cardboard lining or packaging or exported to make more newsprint.

In a sensitive greenhouse gas era, newsprint and other paper producers are conscious they may be seen as environmentally unfriendly or even uncaring polluters.

PrintNZ, which represents the country's diverse printing companies, commissioned research into attitudes to the industry and presented them at a print summit meeting at Spicers Paper in Auckland last month.

Wellington's Chilli Marketing found consumers want reassurance that their buying habits are not harming the environment. There are a number of positive emotive drivers associated with print - freedom, indulgence, relaxation, nostalgia and belonging, according to researcher Karlene Hazlewood.

It is seen as having clear key strengths over online because it is permanent, tangible and accessible. There is a strong and enduring demand for a physical product.

But there is also a negative. Guilt.

Sustainability and concern for the environment are important to consumers and they need reassurance resources are being used effectively and there is proper disposal and recycling.

Willie Townend, Norske Skog Tasman's market director, is happy to offer that reassurance.

His Norwegian-based company operates New Zealand's only newsprint mill - at Kawerau between Rotorua and Whakatane in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

Every day 900 tonnes of newsprint are produced here - 300,000 tonnes annually. The country's total annual paper production is about 500,000 tonnes.

The country's 22 daily newspapers, three Sundays, several bi-weeklies and hundreds of communities consume 95,000 tonnes of newsprint annually.

The remaining 200,000 tonnes production is shipped to Australia and Asia, earning valuable export income of about $224 million.

"We recognise community standards and expectations in relation to forest practices is the critical first step towards a sustainable future," Mr Townend says.

"We've cut our greenhouse gases per tonne of production by 25 per cent since 1990 and we're on target to cut them by another 25 per cent by 2020."

He says wood fibre is tracked from the forest to the consumer, providing proof the finished product originated from a responsibly managed forest, just as individual livestock are now tracked from farm gate to dinner plate.

"Our production at Tasman is a waste-based process," he says. "Rather than recycle waste paper as the feedstock we use waste wood chips.

"If we didn't use the wood, the chances are it would either be exported to another paper producer or simply go to landfill or be allowed to rot in the forest.

"With New Zealand already recovering over 70 per cent of paper consumed in the country it isn't economic for us to recycle paper here but it is economic to use waste wood.

"The newsprint that is used in New Zealand is then largely collected and exported for reuse overseas where it is prized as virgin fibre, being recycled as much as three to five times".

There were not always such environmental concerns. The mill opened in 1955 at the government's urging to exploit the Depression-era forests that had then matured. It was on land gifted by local iwi to the Fletcher family in return for providing employment and developing resources.

It offered an excellent fresh water supply from the pristine Tarawera River, geothermal energy, a deep water port at Tauranga and proximity to the forests.

For many years waste went untreated straight back into the river, a horrifying practice to today's thinking.

Paper mills are huge users of water, 43 million litres a day in Tasman's case.

Now pulp residues are separated and sold for garden compost and the water runoff is filtered through large aerated settling ponds.

The treated water is still tea coloured when it is returned to the Tarawera but it is oxygenated and not toxic. The downstream trout fishery attests to that.

Gary Cassidy, production support manager, says the mill is groundbreaking in another way in that it is the only one in the world to use geothermal steam only to produce the pulp and dry the paper.

The mill has had its own renewable energy source, a small supplementary geothermal plant producing 7 megawatts, but now Mighty River Power has built a geothermal plant on the Tasman site.

The field, owned by the Tuwharetoa tribe, has proved much richer than projected.

It was expected to produce 68MW, then 80, then 90 and the giant turbine that was finally installed is providing 110MW.

That is enough to largely power the mill, which consumes nearly 3 per cent of New Zealand's total demand.

Most of the power is sucked up by the refiners, giant centrifuges with heavy steel blades that split the wood chips before they are pulped and spread across high-speed nylon mats where the paper takes form.

One of the most important players in the newsprint manufacture process is production planner Don Ford.

His art includes ensuring the wood chips do not get too dry, turning the piles over every three days or so to keep them fresh.

The chips, sourced only from pinus radiata, have regional variations, just like grapes. Faster growing trees from more favourable areas have longer fibres, which are weaker. There are colour variations too - older wood is darker.

If Ford gets it wrong, the paper will not meet specifications, the company's economy will be damaged and customers will be decidedly unhappy.

This is particularly vital in newspaper printing plants where the newsprint rolls are threaded around the page plates and run at high speed and high tension.

And if the fibres do not lay correctly in the paper, the ink will not take evenly, registration will be out and the print will be blurred.

It can be as little as one week between a tree growing in a nearby forest to it being part of a printed newspaper.

Ford explains it is not a case of pristine forests being destroyed to make quickly disposed-of newspapers that in turn clog landfills. The wood chips come largely from 13 sawmills from Gisborne to Auckland and across the central North Island.

About 75 per cent come from offcuts - the rounded shoulders of logs left when square timbers lengths are cut from them, the side branches and the spindly top few metres.

The remainder are reject logs, those that are too weak or misshapen to be cut into house framing and other construction or for export to Asia. While the pines go through their growing cycle, they act as carbon sinks, absorbing CO2, a major greenhouse gas.

"Rather than being destructive, ours is a good news environmental story," Mr Townend says.

* Tim Pankhurst is chief executive of the Newspaper Publishers' Association.