The point of newspaper recycling is to keep the piles and piles of newspapers that are distributed daily from ending a brief existence in a landfill, where they become useless and, due to the sheer volume of newspapers printed and distributed daily, would quickly fill up available landfill space.
Especially for recycling plants, newspaper recycling is vital. Newspaper recycling is a profitable business that results in a good supply of cheap paper; both the recycling plants that collect the newspaper, recycle it and remanufacture it into paper and the printing industry that uses the paper depend on the supply of recycled newsprint.
Newspaper recycling is common through North America, which includes Canada and the United States, as well as in many European countries. While newspaper recycling is less common in third-world countries, so is newspaper distribution, so the need is significantly lower than in the Western world.
Newspaper recycling is not extremely complicated. It begins with the collection of old newspapers, which are transported to the recycling plant. The newspapers are dumped into a solution of chemical detergents that remove the ink from the paper. The wet paper is then filtered to remove foreign objects (staples, dirt or bits of tape); after filtering, the paper is bleached, then it is dried, usually via a system of mesh conveyor belts. Once dry, the papery pulp is sent through steam rollers that remove any additional moisture and flatten the pulp back into paper. The new paper is finished by trimming and rolling, after which it is transported to its new owners, often to become newspaper again.
It takes more energy to make newspaper from new material than it does to recycle old newspaper again; recycling does not require new materials, which means more deforestation, but only the energy and processing to convert old materials back into new, usable paper.