How to Avoid Bad Acid Trips

Test Your Paper with a pH Pen

Over the past 10 days, I have been trying to figure out the "meaning" of my pH pen test results, and of the responses of the companies whose "acid-free" papers appear to be acidic.

When I first asked the president of Scrapbook.com why his company does not sell pH pens, he claimed that it was because nobody bought them any more, and that people would trust the testing done by manufacturers. Unfortunately, my testing has shown that even "careful" manufacturers (who hire outside testing agencies to measure the acid levels of paper) still sell paper which tests as "acidic."

I used five pH pens. All five pens indicated that one paper (from Nature's Handmade Paper) was acidic. Three of the five pens clearly indicated that two other papers were acidic, but two pens did not apparently change color and thus indicated that those papers were neutral or alkaline.

In the end, then, I was reviewing two different groups of products: pens and papers.

Pens: Here are the five pens I used (in alphabetic order):

• Abbey pH Pen - purchased from Demco, $5.09 plus s&h
• American Crafts pH Tester Scrapbooking Utility Pen - purchased from a seller on eBay, $2.39 plus $1.25 s&h ($3.64 total)
• Light Impressions pH Test Pen from Light Impressions, $4.95 plus $6.95 s&h ($11.90 total)
• Lineco pH Testing Pen - purchased from Paper Mojo , $7.00 plus $7.25 FedEx s&h ($14.25 total)
• Lithco pH Paper pH Test Pen - purchased from Bosworth Papers, $10.85 plus $4.25 s&h ($16.00 total)

When I called Light Impressions on Monday morning, July 25, they immediately admitted that after another customer complained last week, they tested their pens and discovered that the results were not accurate (in some cases, their pens even identified highly acidic newsprint as "acid-free"). The company looked at my scanned results and confirmed that their "normal" pen should give much more distinctive color changes. Light Impressions was not yet certain whether the problem is a manufacturing error, a problem with "shelf life" of the pen, or some other issue. However, they assured me that they are working with their manufacturer, and promised to send a new pen when it is available.

Similarly, Lithco advised that the "shelf life" of the chemical used in its pens is only about six months, and that the pen I used was apparently older than that (which may reflect time stored at the Japanese manufacturer, Lithco's warehouse, and Bosworth's warehouse).

My conclusion is that any consumer who wants to test the acidity of paper should not buy the Light Impressions or Lithco pens, which only changed color for the most acidic papers I used. Instead, I would recommend using the Abbey, American Crafts, or Lineco pens (in that order) -- but it seems likely that some or all of those pens might also "age out" of effectiveness.

Papers: I received responses from two of the three companies whose papers tested as "acidic" by the three pens I recommend.

• AmScan: I'd like to believe that AmScan's papers were technically "acid-free" (neutral) when made, but that over time, they become acidic. However, AmScan failed to respond to any questions, so I must recommend that consumers avoid all AmScan products, despite their claims to be "acid-free and lignin-free." (Even if AmScan changed its manufacturing process at some time, consumers could not know which AmScan papers to trust because there are no copyright or manufacturing dates on its papers.)

• Nature's Handmade Paper: This company was just sold to a new parent company in January 2005, and the new parent company relies on testing done by its predecessors. The company's president spoke with me and emailed, expressing strong concern about my results. He reported that after reading my article, he used a Lineco pH pen to test his "Celery" paper, and the results were opposite (did not indicate acidity). He admitted that, like me, he is not an expert on acidity, and promised to conduct more scientific tests. Unfortunately, since my results were the most conclusive for this paper, I must strongly urge that scrapbookers should test any NHP paper before using it.

• Creative Memories: Creative Memories admits that when it discontinued Inkjet Matte Paper "because of slow sales," it had also discovered that the paper did not have "shelf-life" (e.g. CM says that the "Inkjet Matte Paper" was initially acid-free, but became acidic over time even while unused in an unopened package).

  Although Creative Memories' package clearly indicates that the "Inkjet Matte Paper" is "Acid-Free," "Lignin-Free," and "Buffered," the company's technology directory frankly acknowledged that it was not buffered, and said that the company did not realize that the packaging incorrectly identified the product as "buffered" until after the product had been discontinued in December 2003. (The product packaging is displayed below.)

  Creative Memories acknowledged that neither consultants nor consumers were ever told that the product "went out of spec over time," or became acidic, and the company never considered a recall because the product sales volume was extremely low.

  Creative Memories' technology director said that if the "Inkjet Matte Paper" is mounted on buffered scrapbook pages, then it should not become acidic.

  Unfortunately, my confidence was reduced when Creative Memories' PR director initially claimed that the "Inkjet Matte Paper" was made in the company's "early years," because my package shows a copyright date of 2001 (Creative Memories was founded in 1987). In a subsequent call, she claimed that she had meant only that this was a product not carried in the company's 2005 catalog, which is not a rational way to interpret her statements during our initial conversation.

  I am quite concerned to learn that that Creative Memories did not formally "recall" a product which it recognized would become acidic during its "shelf life," and thus would almost certainly be sold by consultants after it had already become acidic. The fact that the product was sold as "buffered" (when it was not) should surely have led any ethical merchant to issue a recall notice -- especially for a product with very low sales, for which the cost of a recall would be minimal.

  I was also offended at the idea, suggested by the company, that consultants or consumers were somehow at fault for retaining and using products from 2 or 3 years ago, instead of using only brand-new 2005 products in their current photo albums. (Indeed, I suggest that consumers concerned about the survival of their scrapbooks might consider buying products now, storing them safely, and then testing them again in a year or two, before actually using them.)

  Creative Memories' consultants are encouraged to market CM's products based on the assurance that they are "acid-free, lignin-free, and buffered." Yet, when the company discovered that it had sold a product that did not meet those advertised claims, it quietly discontinued the product, without notifying its consultants or customers.

  This incident places a cloud over all of Creative Memories' products and its consultants' marketing claims. I don't believe any reasonable consumer can rely on the company's claims any longer.

  In addition, I am extremely upset to discover that even as Creative Memories promotes the importance of acid-free paper, and promotes its own products as acid-free, it actively discourages the use of pH pens which could detect its false claims (see Creative Memories' "Paper FAQs").

  Of course, as I wrote above, pH pens are not completely reliable,and some consumers might not properly use them; the company's technology director also notes that industry standard call for a different, far more complex and expensive form of testing by makers of "acid-free" papers. But given Creative Memories' knowledge that it has sold products which were sold to consumers as "acid-free" and "buffered" when neither claim was true, its discouragement of the use of the only economical method for consumers to test paper seems self-serving and deceitful.

  Finally, I must make clear: I only found one paper from Creative Memories that tested "acidic," and it was a discontinued product from 2003. Of course, that product probably would not have tested as "acidic" when it was in CM's catalog. This raises some concerns about my tests on "current" CM products which did not identify any that were acidic.

  I will continue to buy and use Creative Memories products, but I don't trust them nearly as much as I did a month ago.

My conclusion is that scrapbookers should buy a pH pen and test each paper they use.

• This is not especially cumbersome: it takes just seconds to distress the back of a page and mark it with a pH pen.
• Scrupulous retailers should be willing to do this at the checkout stand while the customer watches.
• It is not enough to test just one paper from a manufacturer, because paper composition and pH levels may change from one print run to the next.
• Unfortunately, a pH pen will not indicate a problem if paper is currently pH neutral, yet contains materials (such as lignins) which will degrade into acids in the future.

I must note that one reason I decided to conduct these tests is that I noticed that many "acid-free" scrapbook papers are manufactured and printed in China, which is notorious for lying about its products (consider the stream of reports indicating the use of "forced labor" to manufacture products for export from China, despite denials by the Chinese government and industry). How can you trust promises from manufacturers in a country where people are killed by the government for telling the truth?

The sky is not falling. My test results do not suggest that there is widespread fraud (or carelessness) in the scrapbooking industry. All five pens indicated that the overwhelming majority of papers were not acidic. And even if a few pieces of paper in your scrapbook aren't truly "acid-free" after a decade, this will probably not substantially reduce the pleasure and knowledge that your family will draw from the scrapbook; the use of page protectors should reduce the risk of acids "leaching" from one paper to another within the scrapbook.

These entries (reviews, critiques, commentaries) are written by Mark J. Welch, and reflect his personal opinions. They are not the opinions of this site's advertisers and sponsors, who are not responsible for this content.