Expanding Scrap Sources: Targeting Office Paper

Office buildings, like printing facilities and other large commercial paper generators, can be excellent sources of recyclable paper. Unlike those traditional suppliers, however, office buildings in many areas have been virtually overlooked by recyclers.

That was the premise that, in the mid-1980s, inspired the principals of Recycall Corp. (Atlanta) to expand their firm's scope beyond its traditional base and seek to capture some of this new market.

The result is that Recycall now specializes in what it calls corporate recycling programs, collecting and processing high-grade office paper and beverage cans source-separated by more than 150,000 office employees of approximately 1,000 Atlanta-area client firms, including the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Turner Broadcasting System Inc., and Coca-Cola's world headquarters.

In fact, today, Recycall's corporate programs account for 80 percent of its revenues. (In all, the company handles approximately 12,000 tons of paper and paperboard and 625 tons of aluminum and bimetal cans annually.) Furthermore, these programs have been so successful that Recycall has formed a consulting subsidiary to help other paper processors implement their own corporate collection programs and has developed a team to manage the programs.

Initially, Recycall established programs at virtually any local business desiring one, scheduling regular pickups for those with more than 40 employees. Current market prices for high-grade white paper, including copy paper, letterhead, typing paper, forms, laserprint paper, and computer printout, are so low that Recycall now concentrates its marketing efforts on firms with 300 employees 'or more, which the company's analyses have shown will generate the volume necessary to sustain the program.

Poor scrap paper prices have also changed the way the 11-year-old firm markets its corporate recycling programs. While Recycall originally marketed its services by emphasizing the revenue-generating aspects of recycling, the company no longer guarantees payment for materials collected 'from office buildings and has been passing along a portion of its collection and processing costs to clients.

Recycall now focuses on four other selling points:

Waste disposal cost avoidance: With the average office worker generating a little less than a pound of recyclable scrap paper per day and employees at insurance companies and banks generating an estimated 3.6 pounds per person per day, an office with 500 employees can discard between 50 and 230 tons of recoverable paper per year. According to Recycall Consulting Services Inc., that translates to a potential cost avoidance of $2,500 to $11,700 per year--approximately a 30-percent savings--based on typical landfill and waste-service fees in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The savings can be even greater in other parts of the country, such as the Northeast, where waste disposal costs are reportedly three to four times higher than those in the South. This point may be moot when working with multi-tenant properties, which often factor in waste disposal costs in tenants' rent.

Environmental benefits of recycling vs. waste disposal.

Corporate stewardship: Clients are taking responsibility for the materials they discard.

Document destruction: Paper collected from office programs is shredded as a normal processing step, but Recycall also offers certified destruction, which includes high-security measures such as special pickups and warehousing, at an additional charge. Among the clients this service has attracted are the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta office of the Internal Revenue Service.

There is no simple formula to making corporate recycling programs work, but Recycall has found three strategies key to success: Keeping the programs simple and convenient, enlisting management support and providing education, and managing the programs using specialized computer software.

Simplicity and Convenience. Surveying a new client's premises and applying the findings to a proprietary formula helps Recycall determine the number and location of collection containers.

Each employee at the client facility receives a desktop file folder made of recycled high-density polyethylene, with the Recycall logo and a list of acceptable and unacceptable materials printed on the front. Clients may also opt to use their own manila file folders, special wastebaskets, or cardboard boxes. Employees save their white office paper in their desk folders, then empty it into 23-gallon plastic intermediate containers, which are strategically located based on office traffic patterns and proximity to copiers, computer printers, and wastebaskets. When the intermediate containers are full, each client's janitorial crew empties the paper into 95-gallon Otto containers, which are then picked up by Recycall.

Desktop holders and intermediate containers can be purchased from Recycall or procured on a lease/purchase option, depending on the client's needs and budget. The Otto containers are rented to all clients at $2 each per month, which is deducted from the monthly checks they receive for materials collected.

For commingled aluminum and bimetal can recovery, the standard collection container is a 50-gallon corrugated box with a plastic liner, placed in break rooms, cafeterias, and other areas where employees congregate.

Multi-tenant programs usually require more containers, particularly for holding cans, than single-tenant office buildings since each tenant likely has its own eating or gathering area.

Client Education and Support. Client attitude plays a big part in the success of programs. Recycall has found that if top management doesn't get fully behind a program and support it, employees won't either and the program will eventually fail.

To foster enthusiastic participation, as well as to keep material contamination to a minimum, Recycall offers a comprehensive employee-awareness campaign that begins up to a month prior to program startup. A weekly series of informational flyers is distributed to employees, along with posters announcing the kickoff date and featuring environmental information. Other campaign components include executive announcements, articles in the client's company newsletter, and an opening day accompanied by plenty of fanfare and informational activities and materials.

Education can't be overemphasized, says the company's president, Leon Udwin. The more people know about the program--how it works, which materials are acceptable, what the benefits are--arid about the need for recycling, the more actively they participate, he points out. To provide extra support, Recycall trains employees at each client firm to serve as "recycling coordinators." These volunteers act as advisers, information sources, and motivators for their respective departments--or, in the case of multi-tenant programs, companies. Because many autonomous organizations must agree to work together in multi-tenant Programs, coordination and training efforts can be exceptionally demanding.

Computerization. Udwin and Recycall's secretary/treasurer, Henry Stiel, credit their specialized computer-management system with enabling them to direct the myriad details of the corporate recycling programs. The system schedules pickups, reports on each account's collections, and tracks all materials bought and sold. Its accounting segment features a full general ledger with charts of accounts, and it handles accounts payable and receivable, including the billing for container rentals and shredding. It also issues aging reports, sales reports by salesperson, and a variety of management information reports. The software, conceived by Udwin and written by data processing consultant Joe Arnold of Mac System Consultants (Atlanta), runs on the plant's network of Macintosh computers.

The system has worked so well that Recycall has launched a new division, Recycall Management Services, as a joint venture with Arnold. The division assists other processors in setting up and managing their operations using Recycall's software.

Recycall puts its computer system to good use in planning its extensive pickup schedule. The computer schedules pickups by geographic zones, factoring in the number of 95-gallon containers at each client's facility, their hours of operation, and the amount of time needed to unload empty containers and load full ones, among other considerations. Some accounts are serviced daily, some are serviced several times per week, and others weekly. The frequency of pick-ups depends on such factors as the amount of material the client generates per week and the storage space available for containers at the client's facility.

One uniformed driver/employee is sent on each collection run. Empty 95-gallon containers are left with the client, while full containers are rolled into one of Recycall's five Isuzu van-body trucks, which are kept clean and painted to present a gleaming image to its "nontraditional" scrap clients.

At Recycall's 20,000-square-foot processing plant, located just east of downtown Atlanta, the full containers are unloaded and grouped according to the type of paper they contain, then the paper is dumped onto a conveyor that transports it to holding bins Although Recycall generally doesn't ask its corporate program clients to segregate their white office paper by grade, some clients tend to have heavy concentrations of certain papers, such as computer printout or white ledger, so the containers from these offices are handled separately in an effort to increase the scrap value.

From the bins, the paper is sent to the company's Williams XL-7014ogger, where it's shredded and conveyed to an American 12000 baler. The firm also uses a Harris baling press to package corrugated and newspaper, which it receives from its scale and industrial customers.

Although Recycall employs no "pickers" on the conveyor lines (the company has only 25 employees in all), it uses a four-step quality-control program at its processing plant, inspecting the paper as it is unloaded, as it is baled, as it emerges from the baler, and as it is loaded for shipment to the mills.

Domestically, Recycall sells its baled paper to two major mills in the Southeast, while also exporting laserprint paper through a broker. Its agreements with mills are established on a month-to-month basis.

Aluminum cans are also picked up during the paper runs. Full plastic bags are replaced with empty bags in the corrugated collection containers, then the cans are trucked to the processing plant for weighing. The cans are emptied onto a magnetic conveyor that separates the bimetal cans from the aluminum cans, which are then fed into a Mosley densifier that compresses them into biscuits weighing approximately 26 pounds each. Recycall sells the biscuits to Aluminum Co. of America (Pittsburgh).

The current state of the office paper market disturbs Udwin and Stiel, and the market could see several more years of oversupply before finding its balance, according to a recent study sponsored by the National Office Paper Recycling Project, a group of the U.S. Conference of Mayors (Washington, D.C.).

The declining paper market has allowed Recycall's aluminum processing business to grow to 15 percent of its total revenues, although it accounts for only 5 percent of overall tonnage. "The aluminum side has always been a steady-earning profit center," Udwin says. But he and his partner do not like the current imbalance. "Everything needs to be purely self-sustaining," Stiel asserts. "It doesn't make sense to be profitable in one area and subsidize another area with those profits."

Despite the profitability of aluminum cans, there is one notable drawback to them: their high loss rate. "Because cans are so valuable, some of them get 'diverted' by building janitorial crews or maintenance workers," Udwin explains.

While aluminum is shouldering a greater load these days, glass is another story at Recycall. The firm has never collected glass containers in its corporate programs, though it did accept them from scale customers as recently as 1990. Today, Udwin notes, "Glass prices have dropped so low it doesn't pay to collect it."

As for plastics, Stiel says, "We're waiting for the economics to make sense before we get into it." In 1990, Recycall successfully collected high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate containers during a test program with Coca-Cola, but selling and processing the material proved to be too difficult. "We just couldn't make the numbers work," says Udwin, "so we've put plastics on hold." They still believe that plastics have promise, but only when more end uses are developed and more consumers locate in the South.

In the meantime, Udwin and Stiel plan to continue expanding their client base and honing their corporate recycling programs, striving to make them a model for other processors to follow.•

The experiences of one Atlanta processing company that has built a successful business based on office paper and beverage can recycling programs offer a lesson in how to establish similar programs.