Ask most people which paper is the sustainable choice and they will say recycled. It is the answer the industry has spent decades teaching, and in Europe the figure quoted is usually somewhere between 70 and 80 percent. That number is doing a lot of work, and it does not mean what most people assume it means.
We make notebooks from stone paper, so we have an interest here. That is exactly why the numbers below come with their method attached: check them rather than take our word for it.
The headline recycling rate is not a recycling rate
The published figure is a ratio. On one side, the tonnage of paper collected for recycling. On the other, the tonnage of paper produced or consumed in the same year. Divide one by the other and you get a percentage.
What it does not measure is how much of that collected paper actually comes back as paper. Collection is not reprocessing. Paper is also traded across borders in large volumes, so material counted as collected in one country may be counted again, or lost, somewhere else.
The ratio also moves for reasons that have nothing to do with recycling behaviour. In a year when production drops, the same collection tonnage divided by a smaller denominator produces a higher percentage. The graph goes up. Nothing improved.
A wood fibre does not last 25 cycles
Laboratory work on fibre degradation has shown wood fibres surviving anywhere from five to around 25 cycles before they become too short to bond into a usable sheet. That figure gets quoted a lot.
In a real mill the working number is closer to one to three. Fibres shorten every time they are pulped, and they arrive contaminated: ink, adhesives, coatings, staples, food residue, wet cardboard. Each pass strips out more of what is usable. This is why recycled paper is greyer, weaker and dustier than virgin paper, and why most recycled fibre ends up in packaging and tissue rather than back in a notebook.
Recycling wood paper is not a loop. It is a staircase down.
Recycling is the wrong question anyway
There is a hierarchy in waste policy, often called the R-ladder: refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, and only then recycle. Recycling sits near the bottom because it is the answer to a question that has already gone wrong. You are asking what to do with waste you have already created.
Stone paper starts higher up the ladder. The raw material is limestone dust left over from cutting and crushing stone, which is waste from another industry. Nothing is grown, felled and processed to make it exist.
That is the argument we would rather make than the recycling one. Using a by-product to make something durable beats making something disposable efficiently.
So where does stone paper go?
In with the plastics, not with the paper.
The binder is HDPE, the same plastic used for milk bottles and shampoo bottles, and it is one of the more reliably recycled polymers. Put a stone paper notebook in the paper stream and it contaminates a batch of pulp. Put it in the plastic stream and it can become raw material again.
This is the part where we are supposed to say the material is fully circular. It is not. There is plastic in stone paper, which means it does not compost and it is not plastic-free. Leave a notebook in a forest and it will not disappear, it will break apart slowly into smaller pieces. Take it home.
What we actually claim
Stone paper is made without trees, with almost no water, and without bleach or acid. Life cycle assessments put its production carbon footprint between 25 and 62 percent below wood paper, a range wide enough that anyone quoting only the low end is selling something.
It is better than wood pulp. It is not green. Those are different sentences and we try to keep them apart.
How to check this yourself
Look up the recycling rate for your own country and read the method note underneath it. Find whether the figure is collection over production, and whether exported material is included. It usually is. Once you have seen how the number is built, it is difficult to read it the same way again.