A planetary atlas of material flowsOpening this view…
Start with an everyday object or material.
Jump directly to a material, regional account or named facility.
From forests to fibre, mills to cardboard boxes, and collection back to paper making. Explore the places and transformations behind everyday paper.
Wood or recovered paper supplies the fibres used in papermaking. A box can contain a mixture of new and recycled fibre.
Wood residues and process water depend on the pulping method.
Fibres are formed into sheets and dried. Corrugated board combines flat sheets with a fluted layer.
Trimmings can return to the mill; product coatings affect later recovery.
Accepted paper is kept in its collection stream. On Salt Spring, the Rainbow Road depot is a documented collection point.
Food contamination and unaccepted items may be rejected.
Sorting separates grades and removes unwanted material. Bales make recovered fibre practical to store, sell and transport.
Sorting rejects require another treatment or disposal route.
A mill separates the fibres in water, cleans the pulp and uses suitable fibre in new products.
Unusable fibre, contaminants and treatment residues remain. No local mass yield is reported here.
Explore the local operations and regional systems that collect, transform and recover this material.
Checking available records…
Recovered paper has several possible uses. The BC program lists new packaging, egg cartons, insulation and drywall paper. Its report does not assign a particular collected box to a particular new product.
A collection system supplies recovered fibre to paper-making markets. Sorting can happen in BC while the mill using the fibre is elsewhere. The end-market table describes that geographic split.