Chlorine Dioxide Gets Environmentalists Off The Paper Industry’s Back
A recent story from ICIS on the positive outlook of the paper industry makes mention of chlorine dioxide as the current oxidizer of choice for paper makers. The industry as a whole turned away from chlorine in the 1990s and now uses chlorine dioxide for the majority of their processing needs.
Quoting the article: “While the paper and paper chemical industries have been historically under pressure from green groups, this has subsided in recent years, observes TAPPI. There have been no considerable environmental and/or chemical issues since the late 1990s, when the industry stopped using elemental chlorine-based bleaching and switched to the chlorine dioxide-based bleaching used now. Consequently, there are no real or pressing legislative pressures on the paper industry.”
A decade of legislative and environmental smooth sailing for the paper industry… This is at least a bit misleading, because this same decade has seen an overwhelming takeover of federal policy by special interest lobbyists, so this smooth sailing is at least in part due to the softening of government regulation over big industry domestically.
However, credit must be given to the paper industry for making the switch to chlorine dioxide. If you read our site you know that one of the greatest advantages of chlorine dioxide over elemental chlorine products is the absence of trihalomethane byproducts when using chlorine dioxide. With the amount of processing done by the paper industry, using bleach was a disastrous environmental choice, undoubtably releasing lots and lots of trihalomethanes into the bioshere. Chlorine dioxide does not create THMs when it oxidizes organic matter. Problem solved.
ICIS is a leading chemical and industrial news and information source.You can read the ICIS report on the paper industry using chlorine dioxide here.
