Pencil made from recycled paper sign of "saving society"

When Chen Gaohua picked up a pencil to take down notes at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (the nation's top advisory body) session, the historian was happy to discover something to write home about.

The pencil, for the first time in the history of the CPPCC as well as the National People's Congress (NPC), the Chinese parliament was made of scrap-newspaper pulp rather than wood.

The pencils are but one of the environmentally-friendly moves by the NPC and the CPPCC to set an example in building a "saving society," where energy conservation, waste reduction and respect for nature are integral to the concept.

"It's a beautiful pencil," Chen said. "It is the start of a beautiful practice."

Recycling paper has become increasingly popular in China after the country started pushing for sustainable development at the beginning of the new century, said CPPCC National Committee member Wang Ping, an environmental scientist and professor at Beijing Technology and Business University.

"Nearly half of the paper produced in the Chinese mainland from January to June 2005 was from waste paper, our studies suggest," she said.

While that is commendable, China still lags considerably behind industrial nations such as Germany and the United States, according to the professor.

"We still have bottlenecks. What prevents the wider use of recycled paper is the fact that its quality is still not as good, and production can be more expensive than paper made from wood pulp," she said.

Apart from problems in manufacturing technologies, waste-paper collection and classification are the main stumbling blocks.

Different kinds of waste paper should be classified according to their future usage as soon as they are collected, so that back issues of newspapers go to making of newsprint and magazines go towards making magazine paper, said the professor.

But many waste-paper collection centres bundle all kinds of waste paper together

Source: China Daily