A friend of mine claims he had the same cold for four years in college-that he caught it the first week of September 1964 and kept it through 1968. It finally went away when he started getting more than two hours of sleep a night on a regular basis.
I also kept a cold through most of college, though I always got 40 or so hours of sleep a week (all on weekends). Now I average one every two or three years. My most recent cold was caught during PIMA's Leadership Conference in New Orleans the last three days of June.
After 10 boxes of Puffs Plus, I'm in the late rounds of this bout and ahead on points. Today's moisturized facial (“sanitary”) tissues are really good. I wouldn't have made it through Round 1 without them.
Sanitary tissues in the '60s weren't so well engineered, or affordable for college students.
My friend, who worked part time at a mall shoe store, says he survived using paper stuffing from the toes of new shoes. I mainly used Whopper Burger wrappers, collected via the buy-one-get-one-free coupon deals published in the college newspaper, which I edited.
The Quality of Tissue is Not Strained. “….it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.” Though Shakespeare was referring to “mercy,” he could just as well have meant “tissue.” No doubt he would have liked the quality of North American toilet tissues. All Europeans, it's well known, suffer from tissue envy.
Most North Americans don't appreciate what they have when it comes to tissue. It takes a few weeks of travel in Russia and the Far East, or even parts of Europe and especially Eastern Europe, to understand what some U.S. tissue advertisements are all about. Even Mr. Whipple makes more sense after a week in Moscow.
Fortunately North America has ample capacity (at least for now) to keep pace with its thing about tissue. And no need to worry …more is on its way. SCA recently started up a greenfield tissue mill and converting complex in Barton, Ala., that will pump 110,000 tpy of commercial tissue products into the U.S. AFH (away from home) market, mainly in the southeastern region. An in-depth article in this issue details the new complex, including its processes, products, and market strategies.
Recycling Dangers. The Barton mill makes its tissue with 100% deinked fiber, processing some 140,000 tpy of recovered papers collected mainly from the Memphis/Nashville/Birmingham triangle.
SCA does not expect any difficulty in collecting the wastepaper it needs for Barton or any of its other production facilities in the U.S., now or in the foreseeable future. But as a whole, the North American tissue sector could begin feeling a recovered fiber pinch sooner that it might think.
The tissue sector in this country is a major recycler, with more than 60% of its fiber coming from the “urban forest.” Its main source is recovered printing and writing papers, seemingly making tissue producers vulnerable to an already high (28%) and rising export rate for this grade. The U.S. tissue industry today consumes only 0.5% of the national OCC stream and 7.6% of ONP, but is taking 22% of the U.S. P&W papers pie, which isn't that large to begin with, according to AF&PA figures.
OCC and ONP in the U.S. are currently being recovered up near their recoverable ceilings, at roughly 76% and 73%, respectively. Beating the OCC and ONP bushes just isn't going to scare up that much more. Only 40% of U.S. P&W papers are currently being recovered, but the ceiling for these grades is much lower due to collection, sorting, and processing hurdles. Percentage-wise, this sector will never be as fertile as OCC and ONP.
As exports of U.S. recovered papers continue increasing into the foreseeable future, and with so much of the OCC and ONP pie already claimed, the recovered P&W papers sector will progressively feel the squeeze. Ten years ago, the U.S. was exporting some 8 million tpy of recovered papers, heavily ONP. Today, that figure has increased to about 14 million tpy, with dramatically increasing percentages being P&W papers.
Something eventually has to give. Either exports of recovered fiber to tissue envious countries will have to be throttled, or North Americans will have to consume less tissue. The situation could grow particularly acute as U.S. tissue mills increase their recycled fiber utilization rates from the current 60% to more like 70% or higher in the next decade.
Who knows, sometime in the near future, there could be a run on new shoe stuffing and burger wrappers. Hold on to those two-for-one coupons.
