Try this. Imagine a day without a display screen. No phone, no laptop, no TV at the mamak. Hard, but you can do it. Some of us still remember that world, and some of us would even pay for a weekend of it.
Now imagine a day without paper.
No receipt. No tissue. No teh tarik bungkus in a paper cup, no nasi lemak wrapped in that brown paper with the plastic-ish lining. No banknote. No IC photocopy for the bank, no borang, no surat. No box for the phone you just ordered online. No toilet roll. 😬
I couldn’t do it. I tried for about ten seconds and gave up at the toilet roll. That got me thinking about paper as a technology, and about how it got so cheap that we forget it is one.
Paper as a general technology
Economists have this idea of a general purpose technology. Something so broadly useful that it stops being one product and becomes the floor other products stand on. Electricity. The steam engine. The internet. I’d put paper on that list, and I’d argue it has been on it longer than any of the others.
Just look at the jobs one material does:
- Memory. Writing, printing, records, the land title your family keeps in a biscuit tin.
- Trust. Money, cheques, contracts, certificates. A piece of paper with the right stamp is a promise.
- Logistics. Cardboard boxes, paper bags, labels. E-commerce runs on corrugated board.
- Hygiene. Tissue, toilet roll, kitchen towel, the paper cover on the clinic bed.
- Food. Cups, wrappers, tea bags, filters, the paper liner under your kuih.
- Building and industry. Gypsum board facing, insulation, filters in your car, sandpaper.
Same basic recipe for all of them. Take plant fibre, break it down into pulp, spread it thin on a screen, squeeze out the water, dry it. The recipe barely changed in two thousand years. What changed is where the fibre comes from, and that’s the part I find interesting.
Paper was always made from leftovers
The story most of us learned in school: Cai Lun, a court official in Han China, around 105 CE. What they usually skip is the ingredient list. Tree bark, yes, but also hemp waste, old rags and worn-out fishing nets. Paper started life as a way to turn rubbish into something useful.
That pattern stuck for a very long time. In Europe, paper was made from linen and cotton rags for centuries. Rag collectors were a real job. Paper mills sat at the end of the clothing industry’s life cycle, eating what people threw away. The supply of paper was limited by how many old shirts a country could produce. Imagine that, paper shortage because people weren’t wearing out their clothes fast enough. 😂
Then in the 1840s people worked out how to grind wood into pulp at scale. That broke the rag ceiling. Paper got cheap, newspapers exploded, and paper went from precious to disposable within a few generations. Convenience unlocked.
Where new paper comes from today
Even now, a lot of “virgin” paper is quietly built out of somebody else’s waste. A few examples, from the very common to the very Malaysian:
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Sawmill residue
Lumber is the money product. The chips, offcuts and shavings left behind go to the pulp mill. A big share of wood pulp is made from what the timber industry couldn’t sell as planks. Even inside the pulp mill, the leftover “black liquor” gets burned to power the mill itself.
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Sugarcane bagasse and straw
Squeeze the juice out of sugarcane and you’re left with bagasse, the crushed fibre. Harvest rice or wheat and you’re left with straw. Both get pulped into paper, tissue and those “eco” takeaway boxes, especially in countries with big sugar and grain industries.
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Cotton linters
The short fuzz left on cotton seeds after the long fibres are taken for textiles. Too short to spin, perfect for strong, long-lasting paper. Banknote and fine writing paper have a long history with cotton. The rag trade, still alive in a cleaner form.
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Oil palm empty fruit bunches
This one is close to home. A palm oil mill takes in fresh fruit bunches, strips off the fruit for the oil, and is left with the empty bunch. Roughly a fifth of every bunch by weight comes out the other end as fibrous waste. Malaysia processes tens of millions of tonnes of fruit a year, so that adds up to a mountain of fibre every single year. Researchers and local companies have been turning it into pulp, paper, moulded packaging and board for a while now. Add the fronds and the old trunks cut down at every replanting, and the plantation becomes a fibre farm that happens to also make cooking oil.
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Paper itself
Last stop: the biggest source of fibre for new paper is old paper. Your Shopee box becomes someone’s cereal box. Each round the fibres get shorter, so the loop always needs fresh fibre topped up from somewhere. Which brings us back to the leftovers above.
The convenience of consumerism and capitalism
Here’s the part that makes me go hmm.
Paper is cheap because other industries are big. The more cooking oil, sugar, timber and cotton we consume, the more leftover fibre there is, and the cheaper the paper cup gets. Our convenience in one aisle is subsidised by our consumption in another. Nobody planned that. It’s just what markets do with waste: somebody figures out how to sell it.
And honestly, that’s the good side of capitalism working as advertised. A pile of empty fruit bunches rotting at the mill is a cost. The same pile turned into egg trays is revenue. Incentive aligned, waste reduced, everybody claps. 👏
But there are a few catches I can’t unsee:
- “Byproduct” can do a lot of greenwashing. Paper made from palm waste sounds lovely on a label. It says nothing about how the plantation itself got there.
- Waste isn’t always waste. Empty bunches are often spread back on the plantation as mulch, or burned to fire the mill’s boilers. Take them away for paper and that nutrient or energy has to come from somewhere else. Usually fertiliser. Usually bought.
- The main product sets the pace. If the fibre supply depends on palm oil demand, then paper quietly becomes another reason the main industry has to keep growing. The leftover starts justifying the left-behind.
- Cheap makes disposable. The cheaper paper gets, the less we think about it. One receipt, two tissues, three napkins, straight to the tong sampah. Convenience is a very effective anaesthetic.
Some of us can imagine a world without screens. But paper?
Screens feel like the defining technology of my life. But a screen is maybe fifty years old in most homes, and it still ships to you inside a paper box, with a paper manual you’ll never read, paid for with a receipt printed on thermal paper.
We were promised the paperless office somewhere in the 80s. What we got is an office with more screens and more paper. Paper didn’t lose to the screen. It moved from the desk into the box, the bag and the cup. From information into logistics. That’s what a general technology does. It doesn’t die, it changes jobs.
Yet to be concluded
I don’t have a neat ending. I’m not going to tell you to stop using tissue. I’m definitely not giving up toilet roll. 😂
What I’m taking away is smaller. The things that feel the most convenient are usually standing on the biggest pile of somebody else’s work and waste. Paper is the oldest example I can think of. Next time I grab three napkins at the mamak, I’ll at least remember they used to be a palm fruit bunch, or a sugarcane, or somebody’s old baju.
And maybe take two.
This blog post is still in progress. ^.^