“We do sell away from home products, not as many as we do for branded and private brand products,” said Ivo Kool, senior product development manager, tissue, paper, nonwovens for Sam’s Club, USA. “One of the things we did see is people were willing to pick up, if there was no premium-quality product, they were willing to pick up an away from home product and use it. 

“We’re big in the copy paper business and envelopes and those things, and what we’ve seen in that business is the capacity has dropped about 40%, said Kool. “We’ve seen a lot of machines that were out buying pulp shut down, they’re curtailed — don’t know if they’ll ever come back. What that’s done is a strange thing because you don’t have any more business waste because everyone’s working from home. So now office waste is not available to the recycle mills. They’re never going to use low-quality waste on those machines — it would be full of stickies and they’d be in big trouble. 

“What I think happened during this three-month period is, you saw the business machines — coated paper, copy paper, forms bond — those guys actually shut a whole lot of machines down. A lot of the away from home machines were switching over to virgin pulp and in a way this thing self-balanced,” Kool noted. “Because half the market of virgin pulp is business paper, the other half is tissue. So, you actually had a lot of the players who were virgin pulp purchasers not integrated mills, integrated mills actually shut down, which allowed pulp to be available for the tissue mills. 

So, we didn’t see a huge spike in prices,” Kool said. “That was one thing we were worried about at the beginning — if everybody starts buying virgin pulp, were we going to go through one these huge upswings in pulp prices. It’s funny because it’s actually level or a bit lower. 

“I think the issue is going to be all these away from home mills running recycle — are we going to see people going back to the office or are a lot of people going to be staying home? If they’re staying home, we’re not going to see a whole lot of office waste out there and what office waste is there is probably going to go way up in price, so actually you’re better forming virgin pulp. There’s one mill in Mississippi that actually shut down their recycle plant and they’re just buying virgin pulp,” concluded Kool.

# # #