Recycled Paper Stands Up Against Non-Recycled Paper in Quality and Performance

Take a look at the image above.  Can you tell which one was made from recycled paper and which one was not?  I remember back in grade school when recycled paper was a dull gray, and looked dingy.  Those days are long gone – the brightness of current recycled paper is on par with non-recycled paper.  I recently compared Boise ASPEN 30 to Boise Multi-Use X-9 Copy paper and I couldn’t see any visible difference.

Performance

Of course, looks are not everything.  The paper still has to perform.  There’s nothing worse than a paper jam midway through a print job.  I tested the same two reams of paper for performance, and neither ream generated a single jammed sheet.

Recycled vs New Paper

Did you know you should actually use a mix of recycled paper and new paper?  Non-recycled paper needs to be included in the mix of the recycling process to introduce new wood fibers to the cycle.  Recycled paper can only go through the recycling process up to seven times before the original wood fibers break down, so when the process is complete, it’s crucial to have new wood fibers in the mix, like Boise X-9 Multi-Use Copy paper, to keep the cycle going.

Recycled doesn’t have to mean dingy, sub-par, or second rate.  You can now get the same quality in a recycled sheet of paper that you expect from a new sheet of paper.