Environmental aspects of Norwegian production of pulp fibres and printing paper

The purpose of this study was to assess the environmental impacts of the Norwegian pulp and paper industry, considering the production of pulp fibres and printing paper. The pulp fibres included in this study are thermo-mechanical pulp and kraft pulp fibres, which differ with respect to the energy consumption and chemicals used during production. The assessed paper grades were super-calendered paper and newsprint. The study was a cradle to gate approach, and corresponds to an attributional life cycle assessment (LCA). The LCA was based on data collected from main pulp and paper producers in Norway. Importantly, aspects related to the increasing use of mineral fillers in the production of newsprints were assessed. The results showed that a reduction of more than 18% climate change impact (kg CO2 eq.) was achieved by increasing the fraction of fillers, in the newsprint furnish. Furthermore, the total climate change impact reduction depended on the applied energy mix. Assuming that the production of printing paper was based only on Norwegian energy mix, yielded a reduction of the climate change impact by more than 44% in 2011, compared to the production based on Scandinavian and European energy mix. Additionally, the input and output transport contributed to more than 20% impact in several cases. We thus concluded that the estimated environmental impacts were affected by; i) the furnish composition of a given paper quality, ii) the input and output transport and iii) the use of different primary grid energy sources.