The Framers Forum

The worlds alailable supplies of wood pulp and other sources of fibre for making paper, cardboard and construction material hs been under considerable pressure for a number of years. I suspect that most of us, like me had no idea about this, but that is how it has been foe a while now. This may sound crasy, but some bright scientist has found a way to make sausage skins out of wood pulp and this has become so popular that is is helping to contribute to the current world shortage of wood pulp for producing other products.

This of course reminds me that most mountboard and backing boards are made from wood pulp and if these items become difficult to source as a result of a wood pulp shortage, this may not be very helpful to those of us who get our living from picture framing. The cellulose fibre obtained from reprocessing wood pulp is not something that we are made to digest and literally goes straight down the toilet, with no possibility of recycling, or recovery.

Is the world going mad? I wonder? Most items that we buy in the developed world are transported from source to customer in cardboard boxes, but we are running out of the fibre to make these all important cardboard boxes. Also according to sources on the internet, local authorities all over the world have stopped trying to recycle cardboard during the covid crisis and the worlds available supply of cardboard and paper is much reduced, leading to supply problems for cardboard packaging.

The mind boggles! Enjoy your sausages folks!

It appears that there is no shortage of lower grade and contaminated grades of recycled cardboard, but the demand for such grades of recycled cardboard is extremely low and the price paid for this recycled cardboard is less that the cost of processing it to the stage where it can be supplied to the buyers. Therefore it just goes into landfill, or gets incinerated.

High grade virgin pulp is not sufficiently available to met the current level of world demand at this point in time. It's an unstable market at the moment and it's possible that thing will change as time goes on. Whetherany future changes will good, or bad, is probably anyone's guess at the moment, but the potential for upward price changes for board related products is definitely there. So watch this space.

Mark,

Have to say I was surprised to read your news above.
As you know I work for a paper mill making about 450 tonnes every day, 7 days a week.

I ran your comments past them and here is their reply.

=============================================
There is no shortage of pulp.
To make paper you need 2 ingredients - WOOD + WATER
The world has plenty of both
In fact over capacity is the reality.
=============================================

Hi kerith,

All I did was to started off with an internet search for packaging shortage and followed various posts from packaging and recycling organisations. mostly relating to recycling cardboard, There's plenty of the internet about this. Lots of cardboard it made from recycled pulp, but sources for recycled pulp have been drying up and there's no money since earlier this year in recycled cardboard type pulp. Do a few searches and see for yourself.

There's plenty of info about it on the wed. If you can find it I get you some links to look at.

Hi keith,

Here a few links that I got much of this fr[url]om:

https://inside-packaging.nridigital.com ... oronavirus

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... rus-crisis

https://www.respondfirst.com/articles/2 ... tage-in-uk

https://noa.uk.net/a-lighthearted-theor ... and-smash/

I don't find it surprising that you were surprised too, I was also very surprised as well. It seems that a large proportion of our cardboard boxes are made from recycled cardboard and paper pulp, but the Chineese, who were buying large amounts of recycled cardboard and paper have bought too much and now are over stocked. so they have stopped buying it. This means that the worlds recycling companies are not finding it economical to recycle and local authorities currently have no market from their recycled cardboard. Sounds crazy doesn't it!

Amazon is also getting critized for excessive use on packaging and posting items that have been ordered to excessively large boxes for really rather small items. So yes Keith, there is a current supply shortage of Cardboard related packaging materials and eventually companies may have to pay more for cardboard boxes, because the cardboard, may need to use virgin pulp instead od recycled pulp. It is worth noting that many of our backing boards for picture framing are using cardboard like materials and also grey board uses recycled news print. So eventually we may be paying more for our banking boards, if things don't get back to normall fairly soon.

Those are all old articles, and the last one (written in 2017) wasn’t intended to be taken seriously anyway - it’s marked “Fun” and the URL has “lighthearted” in it. The other articles were written in July, April and April respectively. There may have been a problem during the first lockdown (who didn’t have problems?) but I can’t see any current articles about shortages.

One of the articles mentions the problem developing from 2018 onwards. I've bought some packaging materials in recent months (mostly cardboard boxes) and the prices have riaen quite a bit, which at the time surprised me. My impression is that this is currently an ongoing situation, which will eventually get sorted out mostly by market forces. but cardboard based packaging prices may rise as a result.

Being on the internet doesn’t make things true

Much of this seems to be credible organisations and what they are saying appears to be genuine. Why should these organisation be putting there names to falsehoods. I looks genuine content to me!

Yes it going mad, even pebbles on our local beach have are starting to wear masks!!!
https://www.theframersforum.com/downloa ... f7195e1d14