How Market Researchers Use Paper Products Data

A brief on pulp, paper or paperboard rarely stays one question. A market-research engagement usually stacks four asks: size the market, place individual countries on it, characterize the supply side, and document the sustainability angle a client's stakeholders will ask about anyway. None of the seven primary datasets Datadory catalogs for Paper Products ships a ready-made revenue "market size" figure, so the working method is assembly: trade values for the global frame, association production series for grade-level detail, and census counts for the downstream buyers.

UN Comtrade international trade statistics is the anchor record and holds the slice's highest quality score, 9 out of 10. Two Harmonized System chapters carry the whole value chain - Chapter 47 for pulp of wood, including recovered paper, and Chapter 48 for paper and paperboard - reportable by reporter, partner, flow direction and year back to 1962, with monthly records for recent periods. The public preview API is free and needs no key; during verification, a query for China exporting under cmdCode 48 in 2022 returned 210 partner-level rows in 0.71 seconds. Across all commodities the database adds tens of millions of records per year at six-digit depth, of which Chapters 47 and 48 are the paper-relevant subset.

For the demand side, US Census Bureau — Economic Census, ASM & County Business Patterns (NAICS 3231) sizes who buys the paper: the latest County Business Patterns release shows about 21,354 US printing establishments, roughly 369,691 employees and $21.2 billion in annual payroll - the downstream consumption proxy a study needs when the question is printers, not mills.

Supply-side concentration questions need facility lists, and US EPA Envirofacts facility database provides them without friction: a REST service requiring no key or registration that joins individual sites across roughly 20 EPA program systems, including TRI, RCRAInfo, ICIS-AIR, SDWIS and FRS. Querying the TRI facility table with a contains-PAPER filter returns 353 rows, each joinable to program-specific permit, release and compliance tables, filterable by a closure flag, and exportable as JSON, CSV, Excel or Parquet under a documented 15-minute execution cap per request.

US EPA Toxics Release Inventory (paper manufacturing sector) turns that frame into a time series. Records run facility-by-chemical-by-year for NAICS 322 from 1987 through 2024, delivered as public-domain Basic CSV files refreshed in November 2025 for forms processed through 5 November 2025. A continuously reporting mill can carry up to 38 annual observations per facility-chemical pair - deep enough to plot a credible release trend in an ESG chapter rather than asserting one from a press release.

Recovered fibre draws on US EPA Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling, whose tables run 1960 to 2018 - paper and paperboard generation was 29,990 thousand tons in 1960 with just 5,080 recycled - and whose material-specific pages put today's corrugated box recycling rate at 96.5%. Upstream, FAOSTAT Forestry - Forest Production and Trade covers the fibre stage no primary source here measures: 104 product items across 285 areas from 1961 to 2024 under commercial delivery terms 4.0, shipped as an 18 MB bulk zip of roughly 2.46 million rows.

Yes for the federal tier, selectively elsewhere. EPA's TRI and Envirofacts records, EIA's MECS tables and the Census programs are US Government works in the commercial delivery terms: reproduce charts and extracts without permission, attribution requested. That covers the datasets carrying the heaviest load in a typical study.