I spent much of my career in the pulp and paper industry, particularly in printing papers, and thus have seen many changes from inside.
The technologies of reducing a log of wood to a slurry of individual wood fibres in water, and of whether they should be brown, creamy or white, has changed dramatically over the last century. Likewise the means of converting that slurry of loose fibres into sheets of paper of MANY types also has undergone enormous change. Originally the emphasis was on capacity to produce ever larger quantities more quickly and hence cheaply. Then some focus shifted to customizing papers for specific uses. More recently as uses of paper have reduced considerably there has been a lot of removal of older production facilities from the business and greater concentration on specialized products.
Paper recycling, as an important part of reducing consumption of resources world-wide, had a huge impact on strategies and costs. Start by realizing that 50% of the weight of a log is water. Of the dry 50%, just under 50% of that is actually pure wood fibres - the rest is non-woody complex natural chemicals as binders in the structure of wood. In simpler papers like newsprint, almost all of the dry material is used in the paper produced. But almost all of fancier high-brightness papers is the pure wood fibres, and the non-woody dry materials are used for other purposes. (Most of that went into energy production, but more work is being done now to isolate and reclaim some of these complex materials for advanced products.) That means that the cost of transporting the fibre resource from forest all the way to end user is a big factor. A century ago that meant that paper mills were normally constructed very near the forest resource, and rivers and lakes used to transport logs to the mill. The paper then was transported by rail or ship to urban population centres for use. Beginning in the 1980's and 90's in North America and elsewhere, the drive to recycle papers and reduce consumption of trees changed that balance completely because the location of a significant portion of the fibres (from 25% upwards) had changed to the "urban forest", leaving the paper mills farther from this source. This hugely impacted the cost of gathering and transporting fibres to the mills, and in many cases caused older mills to close while new ones were built very close to large cities. The process also has had an unexpected secondary impact via world trade patterns. There are many countries where concerns for environmental impacts are much less important than for earning dollars, and many of those countries have used central government large-scale financing to build brand new high-efficiency mills that have taken significant shares of world paper markets.
The world paper industry was still adjusting to these pressures when the development of cheap efficient computer systems exploded. At first this had the impact of increasing use of office papers for printers to offset reduced use of other paper grades. But now we find a huge portion of transfer of information is being done electronically with no paper involved. Obviously this impacts use of newsprint, advertising flyers, monthly magazines, high-end sales brochures, etc., both in the dispersal of information and as media for advertising. So again, the results are that older production facilities are shut down leaving fewer still operating, and those are the newest most efficient ones. Further, many of those are the newest ones installed outside of first-world countries.
I spent a couple of decades in coated fine papers. What are those? Virtually all are white, from slightly creamy to super-white, but the field also includes many coloured papers. A lot of that group are for advertising, both as direct sales brochures and as magazines. Our mill also made many specialty papers for postal reply cards, waterproof labels on beer bottles, wallpaper, chocolate bar wrappers, soap bar wrappers, food packaging, lottery tickets, self-adhesive labels, office papers (white and coloured), lined school notebook papers, gift wrap paper, etc. I also worked in the newsprint portion for a few years, and a short time in market pulp mills that make pulp only and then sell it to paper makers. I live in northern Ontario in Canada. In this region in the 1960's there were four market pulp mills, eight newsprint mills, one linerboard mill (the facing paper for cardboard boxes) and one fine paper mill. Right now there remain one newsprint mill, one fine paper (office papers) mill, and two market pulp mills. That's about a 75% shrinkage of production and sales and employment - more than world-wide average, but typical of what happened in older paper industry locations.
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