The demand for packaging is growing, which means that demand for waste paper will grow as raw materials. (Alpabern AG)

In Bern, the largest in the country line for sorting and recycling of waste paper was launched. Yesterday it was first presented to the general public in the territory of the technopark of the company “Barec-Gruppe” in the north of the city. The line is called “Recycling-City” and it will be able to process and sort up to 70 thousand tons of waste paper per year, including various types of cardboard, the share of which in the total volume of secondary paper raw materials reaches about 30% in Switzerland.

Customers of the new production line will be factories producing newsprint. As Urs Schenker, head of Alpabern AG, a subsidiary of Barec-Gruppe, said, the company will become the largest and most effective line of its kind in Switzerland. But that’s not all.

The special feature of the association “Recycling-CityExternal Link” will be a specialized innovation workshop for the environmentally friendly destruction and disposal of modern digital media with secret data, built by Datarec AG, another participant of the Barec-Gruppe holding company.

Such services can be widely claimed by banks, insurance companies, as well as the armed forces. The workshop will be located in a special room isolated from the outside world of concrete and equipped with the most modern surveillance and security systems.

Globally in demand raw materials

In the creation of Recycling-City, Barec-Gruppe invested several million francs, and the question arises – why? Is it really possible to bring profit to our digital business with old paper? “More than that!”, Notes Beat Kneubühler, executive director of Verein Recycling Papier und Karton, an inter-industry union of companies involved in the processing of paper and paperboard.

According to him, waste paper in recent years has turned from garbage into a precious and globally popular type of raw materials. China, for example, does not accidentally massively procure waste paper in Western countries in order to produce modern packaging from it. As for Switzerland, the Confederation does not sell paper to China

“We are too far from export-oriented seaports, for us such a business would not be cost-effective,” says Ulrich Egger, direct manager of the Recycling-City project. But at the same time, Switzerland could supply raw materials to factories that are located near such ports. And this is exactly what the new production line in Bern will be doing.

The Consequences of the Digital Revolution

What we used to consume on paper (newspapers, books, magazines) is now increasingly on the Internet, and therefore in the medium term, the volume of consumption of traditional paper should, in theory, be reduced. However, in reality the situation looks quite different.
Indeed, Internet commerce is flourishing, but the goods ordered by customers must be packed and delivered. And for the production of packaging, paper and cardboard are again required. The same is true of the latest data provided by the enterprises of the Swiss paper industry: the demand for packaging is growing, which means that demand for waste paper will grow as raw materials.

In neighboring Germany, there is a similar trend, where the volumes of paper and cardboard packaging have been growing steadily in recent years. In Switzerland, the collection and recycling of waste paper are also experiencing a stage of growth. Beat Knoybühler says that in the year the Confederation produces about 1.3 million tons of waste paper, with about half of this accounted for by private households. On average, every Swiss man produces 160 kg of old paper and cardboard per year