Is stone paper recyclable? And is paper recycling as good as you think?
Ask most people which paper is the sustainable choice and they say recycled. That is the answer the industry has drilled in for decades. The Netherlands is genuinely good at it too: in 2024, 81 percent of non-packaging paper was collected and 89 percent of paper packaging, against a European average of 75.1 percent [1][2]. Best in Europe.
That figure does a lot of work, though, and it does not mean what almost everyone thinks it means.
We make notebooks from stone paper, so we have a stake here. That is exactly why there is a numbered reference list at the bottom. Check them rather than taking our word for it.
The recycling rate is not a recycling rate
The published figure is a ratio. On one side, the weight of paper collected for recycling. On the other, paper consumption in that same year. Divide one by the other and you have a percentage [3].
What it does not measure is how much of that collected paper actually comes back as paper. Collecting is not processing. Part of Dutch waste paper is also processed abroad, mainly in Germany and Eastern Europe, with the transport emissions and reduced traceability that come with it [4].
The ratio also moves for reasons that have nothing to do with recycling behaviour. Cepi itself noted that the record rate of 79.3 percent in 2023 was partly explained by unusually low paper consumption that year [3]. Less paper consumed, same collection, higher percentage. Not one extra sheet was recycled.
And material disappears at the mill. Research on European paper mills shows the yield of recycled paper production can drop to 75 percent, with up to a quarter of the collected paper ending up as sludge [5].
| What people read into it | What the figure actually is |
|---|---|
| 81 percent is recycled | 81 percent is collected, not necessarily reused |
| Paper is endlessly reusable | A fibre averages four loops in Europe |
| Recycling is a closed loop | It is a staircase down, towards packaging and tissue |
A wood fibre does not last 25 loops
That figure of 25 comes from a laboratory study under ideal conditions [6], and the sector likes to quote it.
The measured reality is lower. Cepi reports that in Europe in 2024 a fibre completed on average four recycling loops before leaving the system [7]. Fibres get shorter with every repulping, and they arrive contaminated: ink, glue, coatings, staples, wet cardboard. That 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. Tissue and hygiene paper leave the loop immediately and cannot be recycled at all [2].
Recycling wood paper is not a loop. It is a staircase down.
Recycling is the wrong question anyway
Waste policy has a hierarchy, in the Netherlands the Ladder van Lansink, with recycling near the bottom:
- Refuse
- Reduce
- Reuse
- Repair
- And only then recycle
Recycling sits near the bottom because it answers a question that has already gone wrong. You are asking what to do with waste you have already created.
Stone paper starts higher up that ladder. The raw material is quarried limestone, ground to a powder [8]. Nothing is grown or felled to make it exist.
How well does stone paper recycle?
As a material, better than paper, and that is not a marketing line but a property of the ingredients.
The binder is HDPE, the same plastic as in milk bottles. In practical tests HDPE has been recycled at least ten times while keeping its material properties [9]. Set that against the four measured loops of a paper fibre, where quality drops every round. Calcium carbonate, the other eighty percent, does not degrade at all and is already one of the most common mineral fillers in the plastics industry. In a plastics stream that stone powder is not a contaminant but a familiar ingredient [10].
What is missing is not chemistry but collection. Stone paper carries plastic recycling code 2 [8], but Dutch plastics collection is meant for packaging, so a worn-out notebook does not formally belong there. And it certainly does not belong with waste paper, where it would contaminate the pulp.
So we start with ourselves. When your notebook reaches the end of the road, you are welcome to send it back to us. The more comes back, the sooner a real stream becomes worth running.
What we do and do not claim
Stone paper is made without trees, without process water in forming the sheet, and without bleach or acid.
We don't quote a carbon percentage. We have since run our own footprint, and the result is more honest than comfortable: in production stone paper sits roughly thirty percent below wood paper, but across the full life cycle it is about a draw, because the plastic holding the sheet together is fossil and counts when incinerated, where paper is scored as biogenic and sits at zero. The full calculation, with sources and with the places it wobbles, is in we calculated our own notebook's carbon footprint.
There is plastic in stone paper, which means it does not compost and is not plastic free. Do not leave a notebook in the woods. It does not disappear, it slowly breaks into smaller pieces.
No tree, no bleach, no process water. That is not the same as green, and we try to keep those two sentences apart.
How to check this yourself
Look up the recycling rate for your own country and read the method note underneath. Check whether the figure is collection divided by consumption, and whether exported material counts. It usually does. Once you have seen how the number is built, you will not read it the same way again.
References
- Stichting Papier Recycling Nederland (PRN), monitoring 2024: 81 percent recycling of non-packaging paper and board.
- Papier & Karton, on the Netherlands leading paper recycling: PRN 81 percent, Verpact 89 percent, EU average 75.1 percent, and the note on hygiene paper.
- Cepi, Key Statistics 2023, European Pulp & Paper Industry: definition of the recycling rate and the note on the 2023 figure.
- Printmedianieuws, on the export of Dutch waste paper.
- Kinnarinen et al., Resources, Conservation and Recycling: yield loss in recycled paper production of up to 25 percent.
- Pro Carton and TU Graz, 2021: laboratory study on fibre recyclability of up to 25 cycles under ideal conditions.
- Cepi, Circular Economy: in Europe during 2024 every fibre completed on average four cycles of recycling and use.
- Stone paper composition and plastic code 2 classification.
- Practical tests showing HDPE can be recycled at least ten times, published via Plastics Today.
- Pebble Printing Group, Stone Paper FAQ, on calcium carbonate as a filler in recycled plastics.
A fuller treatment of the same figures, with all the links, is in the article The truth about paper recycling on moyu-notebooks.com.
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