Beyond Pulp

"It handles like plastic and does a lot of the things that plastic does, yet it prints more like paper than anything else we've seen," Heller says.

Opaque Papers

Another alternative is high-opacity paper, which uses opacifying fillers to increase opacity without increasing the basis weight. For example, a traditional 20-lb. copier bond has an opacity of 87, while a "high-opaque" version has an opacity of 93, higher than 24-lb. bond. This is done to prevent show-through without raising the basis weight.