Recycled paper products: demand greater than sales - Retailing & The Environment

Discount Store News, March 18, 1991 by Laura Liebeck

Paper recycling is not an entirely new phenomenon. Many paper products, such as cereal boxes, various tissue products and some newsprint, have used recycled fibers for decades. What is new and growing is the recycling effort in some printing and writing areas, spurred by the current interest in the environment.

Numerous manufacturers are attempting to fill that need with a variety of products.

For one, Stuart Hall's new Green Leaf line of green stationery will begin testing a line of cash register tape at a number of major retail accounts during the first quarter, said Charles Hanson, chairman. Green Leaf consists of 34 sku's of school and office stationery products and an additional 12 sku's to 14 sku's will soon be added in office products, he said.

Part of the Green Leaf program is one page of recycling and garbage facts located on all products with a cover.

"If you can't tell the kids about it, they can't relate to it," said Hanson.

TOPS Business Forms, with a program of 23 sku's under the Second Nature moniker, includes what they call a Flash-Fax Letter, a form that triples as a cover sheet, instruction form and response card.

Manco, known for its various home improvement products, offers recycled paper alternatives in self-stick notes, kraft paper, and Caremail boxes, and also is using all recycled materials for its product packaging and company correspondence.

Other manufacturers offering office/stationary and back-to-school paper products from recycled fibers include:

* Mead, via its Green Cycle line. Encompassing a wide range of back-to-school products, Green Cycle includes such items as wirebound and single and multi-subject notebooks, legal pads, clasp envelopes, hanging file folders, kraft envelopes, memo and steno pads and plain writing paper; * DataCom, with Evolution. With about a dozen sku's, Evolution is packaged with a colorful yellow green and lavender cover sheet featuring a tree, the sun and the globe plus a message that says "Help The Earth Fight Back"; * Norcom. Although the program carries no formal name, product covers display the recycle symbol of arrows boldly in the center and a tree pattern at the top. The program features four sku's.

Recycled paper is also making its way into the greeting card industry. A sampling there has found that:

* American Greetings' new American Greetings to the World line uses recycled paper; * Sangaman is poised to introduce a line of cards with environmental messages that are printed on recycled paper; * Great Northwestern Greeting Seed Company is printing its hot chocolate line of cards on recycled paper.