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Newspaper recycling is one of the most successful recycling story. As a result, newspapers have been collected worldwide for decades and thus represent a large quantity of a relatively cheap and available source of lignocellulose. If newspaper recycling has multiple advantages, it nevertheless involves some severe wastewater and odor emissions, and produces harmful sludge. Moreover, due to the loss of some fiber properties during the recycling process, paper can only be recycled 5-7 times. Therefore, investigating new valorization routes for unrecyclable newspapers are of interest. Newspapers used in this work contained between 51 to 64 % carbohydrates on a dry basis (74% being glucan), which could enzymatically be hydrolysed into fermentable sugars for further bioethanol or biochemical production. Low glucan conversions (20-49%) were found, however, which led to the investigation of multiple pre-treatments to improve sugars release. Surfactants such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), polysorbate 80 and polyethylene glycol (PEG) have the advantage of requiring mild conditions which significantly reduce the energy demand of the pre-treatment step. They can reduce the negative impact of lignin on enzymes, increase enzyme activity and protect cellulolytic enzymes. Several surfactant use strategies such as washing, soaking, addition during hydrolysis, surfactant combinations were tested using the 3 products mentioned earlier. A simple mass and energy model was developed to select the most economically feasible surfactant pre-treatment. Addition of 0.5% SDS in the reaction medium was found to lead to the maximum amount of the cheapest sugars with 20% extra been released.