Pet Forum / Mammals / Rats / November 2003

Paper is a natural wood product & is nontoxic. If pets eat it, it is empty
calories so not a good thing -- but that's true of ANY bedding.

If one REALLY wants to know what is in recycled paper you do NOT ask the
vendor who has a personal investment in telling you everything's jolly.
Fortunately there are archival technicians & other independent researchers
who are VERY interested in establishing all aspects of paper quality, so
the information is available, & that is a literature I'm  very familiar
with. There is also a large body of research on recycling science,
published. Now a moron such as yourself might write letters to
manufacturers asking for answers & getting sales pitches; anyone
intelligent checks into matters. You clearly aren't familiar with anything
at all, & you keep making wiild & nonsensical claims with follow-ups for
ME to prove it for you, since you cannot prove it.

Since there are thousands of published independent studies on what is in
recycled paper products, YOU should be able to cite the ones that show it
is toxic to pets. I know you can't make the citations because you're
rather ignorant & a know-nothing, but if someone SMARTER than you wondered
if there was any truth to any of the nonsense you heap up & heap up, they
could easily find credible sources, & discover you're full of sh.t.

You can't have it both ways. Antiquated bleeching technology used chlorine
to whiten pulp (most bedding products don't bother to whiten the product
however & are not bleeched). You allege toxicity, a VAGUE possibility with
chlorine. In fact the modern non-chlorine bleeching technology is
completly non-toxic, had to be made so because people eat off recycled
paper in the form of paper plates, paper cups, & paper packaging -- if it
were toxic, toxicity would transfer to food, so this is one of the most
carefully controlled technologies going. The non-chlorine bleaches are of
extremely low toxicity, then are rinsed out of the pulp before it it is
turned to paper resulting in a recycled product that is 100% non-toxic.
You're talking out your a.s, as always. I've told you before PROVIDE
CITATIONS when you make such nonsensical statements. Sometimes indeed
stuff that sounds silly has a basis, but since virtually none of your
silliness has any basis in fact, we need citations to take any of it
seriously, on the off-chance you're ever almost right.

apparentlythe only possibility of this causing toxicity would be if there
were chlorine salts remaining even after bleeches were rinsed out. As
point of fact, nowadays only non-toxic methods of

As I pointed out, & as even a moron should be able to understand, the
bleeching technology for modern recycled paper results in a 100% non-toxic
paper. If your kid eats it, if your pet eats it, or if your uncle stuffs
it up your a.s, you're not going to be poisoned. Your irrationality knows
no bounds. You make excuses for putting your pets on bedding that exudes
toxic vapors by alleging a non-toxic paper product might be toxic if
eaten. You perform acts known to be hazardous because you believe acts
known not to be hazardous might also be hazardous. You need to talk to a
doctor about these delusions, since education doesn't effect you it must
be your personal chemical imbalance making you crazy, & that can often be
fixed if you seek help.

Inks are made of soy & are nontoxic. Stop making wild assertions about
things you know squat about.

Bonding agents toxic? Name the toxic bonding agent. If it's a toxin, it
has a name. Want me to name it for you? It's called lignin. It is a
natural & harmless. Moron.

Good lord. First you allege falsely that deinking methods (called
bleeching) are toxic, when they are not, then you allege that bonding
agents are toxic, when what is used is harmelss lignen, then you allege
that none of these additives are removed. In fact even by the old methods
of chlorine bleeching, in order to stablize the paper color & the paper
itself, the cleaning agents are rinsed out. If they were not rinsed out,
chemical interaction with lignin causes paper degradation (not toxicity,
but degradation of the product itself).

Wrong. Their purposes are to save resources by recycling rather than
filling up landfills, by producing products that are useful, profitable, &
which store well. Of coruse everything you're saying is just one long red
herring because it's your excuse for putting your pets in a KNOWN toxic
environment because you think to do the right think would be toxic too, so
the facts of the matter are clearly of no interest to you. For others,
though, I will post below some of the realities of paper recycling as
regards toxicity. Even if eating a shitload of it COULD have been toxic,
that's a poor excuse for using a bedding that is known to be toxic just by
being in its presence.

You lying fool. This is one of the most intensely studied industries in
the world. No aspect of paper recycling lacks vast redundancies of
published studies.

Obviously. And knowing 0% of the matter you proceed to make assessments &
allegations you are not even slightly qualified to undertake. Of course if
you weren't a moron you could read a one or two lay articles on the topic,
by authors who HAVE checked the science. But any amount of knowledge
appears to be too much for you.

What you know about chemistry couldn't paper a dollhouse, so I believe you
are lying again, as you have lied many times already why not here too. For
one thing, anyone with a "background" in any kind of science at all
wouldn't be so adverse to independent research, so your boasts of having a
background in anything more complicated than frycook or janitor is not
believable, & I wouldn't trust you even to do those fine jobs skillfully.

I grow monkshoods in my garden. They're deadly poison. Yes, every action
of any kind, even taking a common sh.t, has reactions. What YOU've alleged
is that a non-toxic product is toxic, THEREFORE you intend to keep placing
pets on phenol-exuding bedding well documented to cause liver damage. That
is callous, stupid, & cruel. All these other excuses you make for yourself
are just incorrect, showing a fantastic lack of knowledge about the
recycling industry, & about the chemical processes of paper manufacture &
recycling overall. This happens to be a serious interest of mine because
of my work as an archivist, editor of published books, as an artist who
works with papers, & as a pro-environment advocate of recycling. I happen
to have looked into this VERY deeply so what is probably vaguely obvious
to everyone -- that you're about as ignorant as anyone can be on these
topics -- to me is even more obvious.

So I'll post below some facts on these matters. I also want to apologize
to anyone mentally retarded for my use of the word "moron," & wish to say
that I know of no retarded person who would ever dream of making
convoluted arguments in favor of harming their pets with phenols once they
learned about them. I should probably have used the term nutcase instead
of moron, as morons are much smarter.

SOME RECYCLED PAPER FACTS RELATING TO TOXICITY:

De-inking (bleaching) methods today use low-toxicity chemicals (peroxide)
or even no chemical additives at all (ozone & oxygen bleaches the pulp). A
batch of pulp has added to it less than 1% bleach to loosen & remove inks.
The bleached pulp is then mixed with nearly one hundred times its weight
in water (the low-toxic bleaches are now reduced from 1% of 1/100th%).
This pulp-infused water is then "atomized" by extreme aeration & calcium
hy
roxide is added, which causes the rinsed inks & de-inking agent to
combine with the calcium into a foamy sludge that rises to the surface of
the pulp pool, is skimmed from the surface, dried, useful chemicals
retrieved from the removed sludge, the rest usually burned. That 1/100th
percent of low-toxic chemical is therefore either recovered for re-use, or
burned, but does not end up in the eventual paper product.

The process results in  a (still) non-toxic de-inked pre-pulp sludge. The
de-inked sludge then goes through reduction in water content & a
post-cleaning process. This is done primarily with heat & requires no
added chemicals. The method is called simply heat dispersal, & it removes
any lingering glues or plastic or petroleum based ingredients that may
been used on the papers before they entered the recycl process & which the
de-inking process did not remove. These pollutants are themselves not
toxic; even the petroleum based content breaks down into nutrients in the
environment. Nevertheless, it would interact with the recycled paper
products in unpredictable ways resulting in unsatisfactory products, so it
is removed before paper is made.

IF the paper is required to be white (this generally excudes bedding
products or cardboards, but does include many products that come in
contact with human dietary items -- mainly it is done for high-end papers
only) the chemical used most is hydrogen peroxide. The peroxide & oxygen
gas methods have in the last dozen years or so displaced earlier methods
that required chlorine dioxide or alkali. The former methods did not
toxify the paper, but resulted in more toxic pollutants to discard, so
that paper mills smelled bad & polluted water ways in manners that recycle
paper plants do not do. IF any peroxide actually remained in the recycled
product, could it be toxic? Who knows the accumulative effect of the
thousands of immeasurably slight trace elements we put in every corner of
our environment every minute of every day -- but where peroxide is
concerned, I, like millions of others, gargle with it daily, at
concentrations millions of times greater than that which whitens high-end
papers. So while this is not a factor in unbleached recycled paper bedding
products for pets, it MIGHT be a trace-element of finer white papers that
are torn up & given to pets to make bedding out of. Fortunately even there
it is completely harmless.

The MOST updated paper recycling plants use the ozone bleaching process.
Plants built since 1992 are apt to use this most environmentally friendly
method.

After bleaching & further cleaning, the pulp sludge next is ORGANICALLY
cleaned by further oxygenation in aeration pools.  Biologically
oxygen-consuming substances are reduced a further 90% by this method.

What remains is turned into new paper products. What went into the system
was by & large non-toxic or of exceedingly low toxicity. The process of
removing impurities to recover re-usable pulp removes all components of
the recycled paper that could be, by even a stretch of the imagination,
toxic. There are multiple reasons to NOT manufacture anything from a toxic
or merely polluted pulp: 1) Much of it will be made into products that
come into contact with food; 2) some of it will become archival-quality
boxes or papers & must be free of impurities that will interact with
lignin, sunlight, or the atmosphere so that it might last for centuries
rather than for weeks; 3) All of it most store some while in warehouses or
store shelves & still not decay after a consumer uses it for artwork or
printing books or storing stuff inside of, so even if not archival it must
still be a stable product, as it would not be with sundry interacting
chemicals & pollutants in it; 4) it must meet rigid government regulations
for recovered & recycled waste materials, the waste product industries
being among the most highly regulated at watchdogged. Your local
slaughterhouse is vastly less regulated & far more dangerous to your
health.

A lot of what we expose ourselves to daily is toxic, either mildly or
greatly, but recycled paper is NOT one of those things. The assertion that
recycled paper bedding for animals is toxic, therefore that phenols in
pine bedding are nothing to worry about, is on the face of it the
irrational ravings of a nutcase. If you dig a little deeper, they turn out
to be the irrational ravings of an IGNORANT nutcase.

When paper is made from this cleaned sludge, the primary bonding agent is
natural lignin. Older acidic bonding agents are no longer used because
they cause rapid degradation of the paper, though even at that they were
not toxic. Uriah formaldehyde is no longer used either.

UNRECYCLED paper requires a more elaborate chemical process because wood
must be dissolved, typically by a sulphite process not required of
recycled paper. This does not make the paper toxic, but it does mean that
virgin pulp is more harmful to the environment, resulting in many more
unusuable & potentially toxic waste materials. So new paper not only
impacts forest resources more greatly, it pollutes the environment more
greatly, though the paper itself is never toxified -- the idea that paper
itself is toxic should sound pretty ridiculous even to anyone who regards
themselves as "too busy" to find out even one or two facts. Anyone who
really cares can find out very easily & have their paranoia allayed in
that regard. So the reason to buy an UNBLEACHED (grey or yellow-grey)
recycled bedding would be because it may have polluted the environment
less than if the product were bleached; but neither product is going to
itself be even minimally toxic. Also the most dangerous chemical used in
paper manufacture (chlorine, with its carcinogenic byproducts of
formaldahyde & dioxine) is not used in any modern recycle plant, but in
the older established paper mills making virgin pulp, not all of them have
been updated. MOST virgin sulphite pulp is also bleeched with ozone or
peroxide nowadays, but when paper DOES use the older toxic methods harmful
to the environment (not to the paper), it is the virgin pulp mills that
have been around longest & can't afford to upgrade their equipment.

Our resident nutcase also seems to believe that chemicals used in the
manufacture of virgin papers will still be in the finished papers &
therefore in recycled papers later on. The most problematical chemical
after chlorine are the sulphites, such as are in the soap you wash your
face with. Sulphites are not dangerous in papers, but even imagining that
sulphite-processed virgin papers WERE toxic, when these papers get used &
then end up in the recycle paper plants, sulphite is removed through a
recovery process before the unusable sludge is discarded. It is recovered
because it is salable to a higher market, either sold back to the virgin
pulp mills so they can desolve more chipped-up trees, or for the
manufacture of sulphate soap, or for use in converting sulphate soap into
tall oil. It would be harmless even if it were in the final recycled paper
product; but fact is, it's not there.

60% of the landfill problems are due to unrecycled paper. The more of it
that is recycled, the better it is for the environment, & for ourselves.
Crazed allegations that products cleaner than home-made papier mache are
harmful is as reactionary as it is stupid. Certainly there are some
problems with the paper recycling industry as with all other industries,
the main ones regarding the methods by which the UNUSUABLE sludge is
discarded. In the past paper mills polluted streams by dumping the
unusable stuff right into waterways; it is now generally dried & burned,
or goes to landfills. It does not effect the paper products per se, but it
is an irresolvable side-effect of our paper usage overall, that it
inescapable results in garbage generation to one degree or another.

When buying any paper product it should EITHER be recycled paper OR "tree
free" paper. While tree free paper is not recycled, it is made from
quickly regrowable crops. Recycled paper may be as little as 20% recycled
in reality, & still puts pressures on forest resources; but tree-free
paper puts zero presures on forest resources. "Tree free" papers are made
from plants that regrow in as little as ten weeks, vs papers from trees
that if harvested young take seven to twenty years to be useable. By never
buying ANY paper product that is not either recycled or non-tree in
origin, we save forest resources, we slow down the rapidly increasing
landfill problem. And the recycling system because dependent largely on
heat & oxygen, when compared to manufacture of virgin pulp, uses less
electricity, has less impact on waterways & atmosphere, & is less
polluting at every stage.

-paghat the ratgirl