Sustana Fiber

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Intelligence

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• Did you know2024

  Sustana's deinked recycled pulp (DIP) is sold to tissue and paper towel manufacturers including Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Georgia-Pacific — who use it to produce consumer tissue products including bath tissue, facial tissue, and paper towels. The COVID-19 toilet paper shortage of March 2020 became acute not because of material scarcity, but because the tissue supply chain is segmented: commercial/institutional tissue (coarse rolls for offices, hotels, hospitals — sold through Jan-San distributors) and consumer retail tissue (roll packs sold at Costco, Walmart) are manufactured in separate product lines and use different fiber specifications. When businesses closed and offices emptied, commercial tissue demand collapsed while consumer tissue demand surged — creating overstock in commercial tissue and empty shelves in retail consumer tissue, despite Sustana and other DIP suppliers having adequate fiber available. The same recovered office paper feedstock was stranded as oversupply in the commercial tissue segment while retail tissue customers cleared store shelves. Sustana's DIP position was technically adequate; the shortage was a structural market segmentation problem in the tissue industry supply chain that DIP supply could not bridge.

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• Concentration2024

  The North American merchant deinked pulp (DIP) market is thin: most large tissue manufacturers vertically integrated their DIP production after the 1970s-1990s to control fiber quality and cost, leaving a small merchant DIP segment. Sustana Fiber, as the largest independent North American merchant DIP producer, occupies a critical role for tissue and specialty paper mills that use recycled content but cannot justify the capital and operational complexity of running their own deinking facility. The sustainability trend (recycled content mandates from retailers, corporate sustainability pledges by P&G and Kimberly-Clark) has increased demand for merchant DIP precisely as the recycled paper feedstock quality is declining — digital communication has reduced the volume of clean white office paper (the premium DIP feedstock), while coarser paper grades (newsprint, mixed paper) are increasing. Sustana faces a structural feedstock quality challenge as the composition of North America's recovered paper stream shifts from clean white office paper to mixed and lower-grade recovered fiber, potentially reducing the brightness and cleanliness of the DIP achievable from recovered paper over time.

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• Origin2024

  Sustana Fiber operates deinked pulp mills at De Pere, Wisconsin and Rivière-du-Loup, Québec — facilities that industrially process hundreds of thousands of tonnes of recovered office paper annually through a wash-and-flotation deinking process originally developed in the early 20th century. The deinking process Sustana uses is fundamentally similar to the froth flotation process in mineral processing: ink particles are coated with surfactants (collectors) and floated to the surface as froth while clean cellulose fibers settle or remain in suspension, paralleling how mineral beneficiation separates valuable ore minerals from gangue. The recovered paper that Sustana processes is sorted office waste — the same reams of white HP/Xerox printer paper printed with black toner documents that corporations, governments, and universities generate daily. Sustana provides the infrastructure that closes the paper supply chain loop: printer paper eventually returns to the fiber supply chain via Sustana's mills, becoming the tissue and towel products used in the same offices that generated the waste paper.

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