March/April 2004
To meet its goal of recycling 55 percent of all paper consumed in the United States, the paper industry plans to explore underutilized “mines” of recoverable fiber. Individual mills are also stepping up their own collection efforts. Here’s the second of our two-part series on increasing paper recycling.
By Robert L. Reid
The U.S. paper industry has a new recycling goal—to recover 55 percent of all paper consumed in this country by 2012, according to the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) (Washington, D.C.). The industry needs this additional fiber to satisfy its own demand as well as the growing appetite for recovered paper overseas, especially in China.
With the easily recovered fiber already being collected, however, the industry must look to new sources to meet its 55-percent goal—to what one mill CEO describes as the “not-fully-tapped mines of offices, schools, institutions and households.” Last issue, Scrap examined efforts to recycle more paper from office buildings. This article explores the opportunities for and obstacles to recycling more residential and institutional fiber, as well as how paper mills are sourcing more recovered paper on their own.
Residential Potential
The typical American home does indeed have considerable potential as a mine of unrecovered fiber. In addition to traditional material such as newspapers and mail, many households generate recoverable OCC by shopping at discount wholesale retailers—and carrying out their purchases in cut-down corrugated boxes—or ordering items off the Internet that are mailed in corrugated containers.
Plus, there’s the growing number of home-based offices—now estimated at 40 million and growing by about 3 million businesses a year. Indeed, the paper consumption of home-based offices was large enough last year for Paperloop.com to credit such enterprises with producing “one of the bright spots” in demand for uncoated papers, especially standard office copy paper.
There’s apparently enough of this paper in home offices to make some paper consumers worry about “good, high-quality office paper being downgraded into a mixed paper” rather than segregated and upgraded, notes Pete Grogan, manager of market development for Weyerhaeuser Recycling (Federal Way, Wash.). Others think it wouldn’t be so bad to turn the residential mix into a mixed paper product since there’s growing demand for mixed paper overseas.
Regardless of where such residential paper could be used, the fact is that much of this home-generated fiber isn’t being recovered. Though the numbers aren’t exact, estimates say the average American family of four produces up to 120 pounds of garbage a week, with paper representing 35 to 40 percent or more of that total.
Indeed, a 1999 survey found that residents of California—a state with a good reputation for recycling—were nonetheless throwing out roughly three times as much residential paper (3.9 million tons) as commercial office paper (1.4 million tons). Overall, that residential fiber accounted for more than 30 percent of the 12.7 million tons of paper sent to the state’s landfills, according to figures from the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) (Sacramento).
A large portion of this residential paper—at least 1.8 million tons—was potentially unusable to many paper mills due to contaminants such as wax coatings, glues, or food, according to California’s data. By grade, this discarded fiber included more than 929,000 tons of newsprint, 426,000 tons of uncoated corrugated, nearly 85,000 tons of white ledger, nearly 152,000 tons of other office paper, plus some 283,000 tons of magazines and catalogs, CIWMB reports.
That’s a lot of fiber being landfilled in a state considered friendly to recycling, a state that has nearly 90 percent of its population served by residential curbside recycling programs, according to BioCycle magazine’s 2003 data. Add in the unrecovered tonnage from other high-population states with lower access to curbside collections, and the potential of residential fiber looms even larger.
Such curbside efforts are part of the overall municipal recovery programs that represent “the majority of the gains we’ve made in the numbers of [fiber] recovery for the past decade,” says Weyerhaeuser’s Pete Grogan. “With all due respect to our industry,” he adds, those recovery gains were mostly initiated by local governments trying to divert material from landfills and, thus, “to a certain degree that [fiber] almost fell into our laps.”
Moreover, as the U.S. economy soured in recent years, several large cities and numerous smaller communities eliminated or considered abandoning their curbside programs to save costs. Thus, after years of nearly uninterrupted growth, the number of residential curbside-collection programs declined from 9,700 in 2000 to just under 8,900 in 2002, a decrease of more than 8 percent, according to BioCycle data. But the actual population served by such programs decreased by only about 0.3 percent, from 139.8 million people to roughly 139.4 million, suggesting to BioCycle that consolidation of programs played some role in that reduction. Still, such programs cover less than half the total U.S. population.
Keeping municipal curbside-collection programs up and running “is where our industry has to focus attention,” says Grogan. “We can’t afford to lose any of those cities—in fact, we need to grow the number of cities engaged in collection programs if we’re going to have any hope” of meeting the worldwide demand for recovered paper.
Curbside Concerns
Of course, not everyone in the paper industry views curbside collection so positively. Indeed, some see curbside programs as more of a problem than a solution for fiber recovery because of high contamination rates. Single-stream systems—collection programs that commingle paper, glass, aluminum, and other recyclables—are often criticized for causing the most trouble, especially due to glass contamination.
Complaints aren’t limited to single-stream material, however. “We’re seeing a decline in quality across the board, regardless of the [collection] system,” notes Janet Kincaid, AF&PA’s manager of fiber recovery and utilization. “We’re finding problems in dual-stream programs that are older, where the equipment isn’t being upgraded, and we’re finding problems in single-stream programs where, even though they’re in their seventh or eighth generations of new equipment, there are still problems with glass.”
As a result, paper companies must “invest hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in processing and cleaning up the fiber,” Kincaid adds.
At the same time, single stream has its advocates who say this approach increases fiber recovery while decreasing collection costs. One of the most public supporters of single stream is waste-hauling giant Waste Management Inc. (Houston), through its Recycle America Alliance organization. The company says it has seen fiber recovery jump as much as 30 percent at one of its newest single-stream operations while still being able to sell every pound of fiber collected.
“I don’t think single stream is going to be the cure-all to collecting more fiber because of the contamination issue ... but it’s certainly going to play a valuable part in it,” says Ben Harvey, an owner of E.L. Harvey & Sons Inc. (Westborough, Mass.) and president of ISRI’s Paper Stock Industries Chapter (PSI). Though single stream won’t work everywhere, it will likely help some locations collect more fiber, Harvey says. More importantly, he notes, the cost savings on collections often touted by single-stream advocates “could make the difference between keeping a program alive and letting it die.” After all, he adds, “none of us wants to see a situation where we lose [a large city] that’s having financial problems—that we lose their paper because they don’t want to put the funds into a recycling program.”
AF&PA’s Kincaid adds a do-it-yourself twist to the idea that single stream can work in select situations. “Certainly, companies out there are getting the fiber they need through single stream at the quality they need, but they state that they’re getting it because they’re controlling the process,” she explains. Specifically, some mills that do their own processing of single-stream material report good results, Kincaid says. When the processing is done by a third party, though, “then a number of our companies have indicated that’s when they see increases in contamination and prohibitives,” she says.
Adding and Subtracting From the Mix
Adding mixed paper—which isn’t always part of curbside programs—while excluding glass can also help boost residential fiber recovery, notes Andy Ockenfels, vice president of operations for City Carton Recycling (Iowa City, Iowa).
When the municipal recycling program in Iowa City dropped glass from its curbside program and added mixed paper in 2000, it “took out a commodity with a low dollar value and a high contamination rate and put in a commodity—mixed paper—where they could combine the different fiber grades,” including office paper, magazines, cereal boxes, and other common household fiber, Ockenfels notes. Mixed paper’s importance in Iowa City’s recycling stream has grown accordingly, increasing from 20 percent of recyclables by weight in 2001 to 25 percent last year, he reports. This is good news for City Carton, which has a steady buyer of mixed paper nearby.
City Carton also operates a modified single-stream system that excludes glass in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Though he couldn’t discuss tonnages, Ockenfels credits the Cedar Rapids program with encouraging smaller communities in the region to launch their own single-stream systems, which feed fiber to City Carton’s processes. “These little communities never had any kind of curbside recycling program before,” Ockenfels says, “and they wouldn’t start up a separated-by-grade recycling program due to the cost.” Thanks to City Carton’s ability to take the glass-free single-stream material collected by those smaller communities, however, “we have more tonnage coming in on a daily basis than we ever had,” he notes.
Iowa is likely not unique in having volumes of residential mixed paper going uncollected. The average for residential mixed paper recovery is about 300 pounds per household each year, notes paper industry consultant Bill Moore of Moore & Associates (Atlanta). But that average takes in Seattle’s 700 pounds per household as well as communities that collect just 25 pounds per household. “If somebody says, ‘I’ve got a residential mixed program in place, but it’s producing 25 pounds per household per year,’ that’s not much of a program,” Moore says.
For more evidence that adding mixed paper to curbside programs can increase residential recovery, consider a survey conducted in 1998 by the Mid-Atlantic Consortium of Recycling and Economic Development Officials (MACREDO) (Philadelphia). The study highlighted some case studies of successful mixed-paper efforts, including Chester County, Pa., which increased paper recovery about 26 percent in 12 residential programs, and Stone Harbor Borough, N.J., which saw recycled paper tonnage increase more than 45 percent after adding mixed paper to its collections.
Mixed Messages
While local policies that add mixed paper or exclude glass can increase residential recovery, other rules or regulations can hinder paper collection, recyclers warn. For instance, franchise agreements, expensive permitting fees for public recycling containers, or fencing requirements that make such containers harder for people to find could limit the recycling services available to certain communities.
Likewise, though Massachusetts has banned corrugated from its landfills, a number of towns in the state also require that boxes be flattened and cut down to specific sizes—otherwise, the material will be left at the curb, notes Johnny Gold, senior vice president of The Newark Group’s Recycled Fibers Division (Marblehead, Mass.). The result is that good corrugated is being discarded anyway because few residents go to the trouble of breaking down their boxes and no one actually enforces the landfill ban.
SP Newsprint Co. (Dublin, Ga.) must contend with glass that was supposed to be excluded from residential fiber-collection programs but that still ended up in the recycling stream, notes Ralph Simon, vice president, fiber supply and marketing. Though the programs in question don’t accept glass, the households put it out anyway and the collectors don’t refuse to take it. As a result, SP has made “multimillion-dollar” investments in large sorting centers near its Georgia and Oregon mills to re-sort material that was supposedly mill quality already but that must be upgraded to meet the mills’ acceptable tolerances, Simon explains.
Collecting Beyond the Curb
Of course, the curb isn’t the only place to look for additional fiber. In addition to households, other potential fiber mines include institutions such as schools and hospitals as well as small retail businesses, industry watchers note. Location can be a key factor. The recycling-focused Pacific Northwest manages to recover corrugated from small generators such as convenience stores that most likely is lost in other parts of the country, says Weyerhaeuser’s Pete Grogan. It isn’t easy, he concedes, but cities like Seattle and indeed the whole state of Oregon offer good models to imitate.
What’s their secret? “Demonstrating tremendous leadership in bringing almost everyone, regardless of size, into recovery programs, working with haulers to encourage them to provide the service [to smaller generators], and doing promotional work in the interest of engaging everybody,” Grogan explains.
Schools in particular remain a good source for more fiber. In California, for instance, CIWMB has noted that despite “a tremendously strong curbside recycling infrastructure ... a large percentage of ONP generated in the residential sector is recovered through means other than curbside recycling—such as school paper drives and buyback centers.”
Likewise, SP Newsprint promotes the concept of “read, then recycle” by using some of the revenue from school newspaper collections to help buy subscriptions for schools so that children have newspapers to read in history or civics class, which in turn feeds more old news-print back into the recycling efforts.
Unfortunately, such lessons in recycling can be forgotten as students move up through the education system. The Newark Group’s Johnny Gold has witnessed frustrating examples of college students on moving days “dumping cardboard like crazy, dumping magazines and news and packaging” into the trash bins on one side of their dorms while the recycling bins on the other side sit basically unused because not enough is being done to educate young adults about recycling.
Hospitals are another potential source of unrecovered institutional fiber, recyclers note. For example, one Massachusetts facility recycled and/or shredded roughly 30 to 40 tons of corrugated and other paper in a recent year. That said, healthcare-generated fiber is definitely not for every packer or consumer. In addition to privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—which can prohibit recyclers from even looking at, let alone sorting, certain documents before having them shredded—hospital fiber can potentially be contaminated with needles, blood-borne pathogens, and other dangerous material. Indeed, that same Massachusetts hospital eventually abandoned its OCC recycling efforts because of organic contaminants.
“There are some limitations in recycling certain things,” notes one recycler, who concedes that his firm “finds it very difficult to service a hospital.”
Another alternative to regular curbside programs that can generate additional fiber is the pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) movement that requires homeowners to purchase bags or stickers for their garbage, thus providing a direct incentive to save money by recycling more household waste. Under PAYT programs, recyclables must often be taken to a drop-off center, though some programs do pick up material at the curb.
Johnny Gold can point to various successful PAYT programs in Massachusetts, and anecdotally at least many PAYT communities do report increased recycling rates—anywhere from 32 to 59 percent, according to one study. Such increases generally cover all recyclables, of course. In at least one Ohio village, though, the PAYT program generated so much corrugated and newsprint that the drop-off center added a second trailer specifically for that fiber.
Self-Sourcing Solutions
Drop-off locations are also key to efforts by various paper mills to find additional fiber on their own. That’s what SP Newsprint is doing with its efforts at schools as well as other “niches for enhanced newspaper recycling,” such as airports and the hotel/motel industry, notes Ralph Simon.
Likewise, Abitibi Recycling (Houston)—which supplies fiber to its newsprint-making parent Abitibi Consolidated Inc.—has more than 11,000 containers across North America in nearly 20 major metropolitan areas, notes Stephonie Kirby, communications director. These Paper Retriever sites, which feature a cartoon dog logo, accept newspapers, magazines, shopping catalogs, office and school papers, as well as mail, explains John Selman, national operations manager.
Though Paper Retriever was launched roughly a decade ago solely as a means of increasing fiber recovery, the program now provides an added benefit: As curbside material becomes increasingly contaminated with cereal boxes and other material that Abitibi can’t use, Paper Retriever generates the type of clean fiber the company needs most, explains Kirby.
The program doesn’t meet all of Abitibi’s needs, of course, so the company whole-heartedly endorses the goal of increasing paper recovery to 55 percent, Kirby says. Indeed, Abitibi sees its efforts as directly contributing to that goal. A recent study conducted by Skumatz Economic Research Associates Inc. (Superior, Colo.) found that Paper Retriever increases recovery in areas served by both curbside and Retriever programs, adding an average of 4.5 percentage points to municipal recycling rates.
Abitibi’s media campaigns to promote Paper Retriever help increase that recovery, Kirby says, as does the presence of the containers themselves. The boxes are placed in highly visible locations and often associated with schools, churches, and other nonprofit organizations. Thus, they “are very colorful, very eye-catching, like mini-billboards that remind the community that paper recycling is particularly important,” she says. The result is good publicity for Abitibi’s recovery and the community’s curbside efforts.
“We believe that those people who may not have previously been motivated in their curbside programs to recycle—because they simply weren’t aware of the value and benefits—are motivated and reminded by the visibility of our containers, resulting in more recyclables placed out at the curb,” Kirby says.
In the end, the U.S. paper industry has given itself eight years to increase paper recovery 7 percentage points—from the 2002 rate of 48 percent to the targeted 55 percent by 2012. The as-yet-unannounced 2003 recovery rate may show that the industry has already closed that gap. Nonetheless, it will be a challenge to reach 55 percent, given that the easily recoverable fiber is already in hand. Instead, mills are hoping that increasing recovery from curbside programs, offices, schools, and other institutions as well as initiating their own aggressive recovery efforts will turn the 55-percent goal into a mission accomplished. •
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
To meet its goal of recycling 55 percent of all paper consumed in the United States, the paper industry plans to explore underutilized “mines” of recoverable fiber. Individual mills are also stepping up their own collection efforts. Here’s the second of our two-part series on increasing paper recycling.