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Paper and Printing

Packaging SA

Paper explained

Paper is more than copy paper. It is the cardboard box that gets your online shopping safely to your door. It’s your child’s school report or first piece of art. It’s the paper bag for your groceries, the carton of milk, the label on the coffee jar, the sack of sugar. Paper is also the book on your bedside table or your community newspaper. And of course, it’s the toilet roll in your bathroom. Paper is part of our lives as packaging, tissue, and printing and writing media.

Packaging SA

The story of paper

Paper has a long history stretching back to ancient Egypt in the third millennium BC.
The word ‘paper’ is derived from papyrus, a plant that was once abundant in Egypt and which was used to produce a thick, paper-like material by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.
Paper as we know it traces its roots back to China at the beginning of the first millennium AD. Traditional Chinese records give the credit for its development to one T’sai Lun (about 105AD). He was subsequently deified as the god of papermakers!


Air quality act will affect Printing Industry

According to Section 21 of the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act , 2004 (the Act) the Minister must publish a list of activities which result in atmospheric emissions and which the Minister reasonably believes have or may have a significant detrimental effect on the environment, including health, social conditions, economic conditions, ecological conditions or cultural heritage. A Notice was published in April 2010 and a number of activities have been listed. In respect of each activity minimum emission standards have been identified and persons undertaking those activities have to comply with the emission standards.


Packaging SA

Urgent Notice

The Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) proposed new regulations in respect of air emissions for the printing sector in January 2012, in terms of an amendment to the Section 21 Notice of the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act, 2004 (AQA). The printing works draft regulations (draft regulation) are provided under ‘Category 11’ of the draft amendment to the Section 21 Notice.