Wait a Second

[forsyth]

Okay, so. Riddle me this, Batman. Recycled paper used a lot less raw materials, energy, water, and pretty much every other resource that goes into paper making.

So why are notebooks from recycled paper usually more expensive than notebooks made from new paper? Is it just the companies figure the only people who are going to care are middle class or better and willing to pay a "conscience tax" or something? Instead of just making plain old bog standard notebooks that happen to be made from less stuff, so they're cheaper to make?

Comments

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Because the process of getting the original raw materials has been refined down through the decades to be very cheap, partly through economies of scale, partly through competition, and partly from having a boatload of companies and people finding it in their best interest to shave costs wherever they could.

Recycled stuff doesn't have those economies yet. The very idea of recycling paper for use in consumer products is only a comparatively recent one, and there still isn't the massive groundswell needed to convince the associated industries that it would be worth investing the required billions to move most of their capacity over to recycled sources instead of raw material.

New ways of doing old things can take decades, if not generations, to fully penetrate an established market. And recycling can't completely replace raw material use, nor is it order-of-magnitude cheaper, faster, profitable or more desirable from a consumer perspective, any of which might convince small start-up companies to steal the bigger ones' lunch.

At the moment, it's still a niche product mainly held together by a thin veneer of government voter sops, a weak consumer desire / social appreciation, and the occasional ability to turn a profit here and there.

I think the amount of recycled material in society will increase over time as the initial processes become faster, smoother and cheaper. There may also be unrelated technological breakthroughs which can be adapted to recycling in the future. But for the moment, where it's uncommon enough for certain goods to actually be labelled 'recycled' instead of simply every product having X% recycled material, it's a semi-luxury product.

As recycling becomes more efficient, recycled products will become cheaper, but they won't be labelled as recycled. Only the expensive, preliminary test products have the label; therefore, anything with the label will be more expensive.