According to a report this month by Recycling International, the Nethherlands, Bill Moore, president of U.S.-based paper recycling consulting specialist Moore & Associates, Atlanta, Ga., estimated that newsprint machine conversions to containerboard production had amounted to some two million short tons in the last two years alone and up to five million short tons across the last decade. 

"We expect to see more conversions," he added, having earlier noted that newsprint production in the U.S. and Canada tumbled from 13.78 million metric tons in 2002 to 5.86 million metric tons in 2015.

At the same meeting, Bureau of International Recyclng (Brussles, Belgium) paper division VP Francisco Donoso of Alba Servicios Verdes in Spain confirmed that International Paper's (Memphis, Tenn., USA) agreement to buy Holmen Paper Madrid and to convert the newsprint machine for packaging production by the second half of next year was expected to create an additional annual demand for nearly 400 000 metric tons of OCC grades in Spain over the medium term; whereas domestic demand for the deinking grades was likely to be cut by more than half.

The European Recovered Paper Association's president Merja Helander, of Finland, warned that "the paper and board industry is changing the product line of machines from graphic to board production with such a speed that, one day, we will see overcapacity in these products."