Whats So Bad About Using Chlorine to Bleach Paper?
Chlorine is used by the paper industry for two purposes. The first has to do with a substance called lignin. Lignin is the natural material a tree uses to hold its cellulose fibers together. Cellulose fibers are the raw material for paper. Because chlorine dissolves lignin, paper mills use it to rinse the lignin out of the wood pulp they need to make paper. Once the lignin is washed away, and the pulp is ready to be made into paper, chlorine is used again to make the paper white. If this were all there was to it, we wouldn’t have much to worry about. Unfortunately, there’s more. When wood pulp or recycled paper is bleached, the reactions that take place between the chlorine, the lignin, and the cellulose fibers produce the most toxic substances ever created. The most dangerous of these includes a family of 75 different chemicals known as dioxins, and a host of other chemicals called organochlorines. How Does Paper Bleaching Affect Me? The wastes that paper mills discharge into the envi
