November/December 2008
Single-stream collection, greater processing volumes, and strong overseas demand for mixed paper are resulting in more contaminants in the recovered paper supply, causing concerns for North American mills. By Marc Hequet
Is more recycling always better? Scrap paper consumers might say no—not when greater volumes result in more contaminants. They argue that the growth in single-stream recycling has led to more plastic, aluminum, and glass in the paper stream, slowing down paper recovery and even damaging their equipment. A process designed to make recycling easier and more efficient upstream makes paper recovery harder downstream, they say, and they and their suppliers are having to adapt accordingly.
Contaminants (nonpaper materials in the paper supply) and outthrows (grades of paper in a shipment other than the one being purchased) are "the biggest challenge in terms of how we design our system to recover fiber," says Michael Finn, chief executive at Recycling Services (Chicago) and chair of the standards and practices committee of ReMA's Paper Stock Industries Chapter. "We design our systems to remove the contaminants to meet the mills" specifications," he says, but that's getting more and more complicated because upstream—in commercial and residential recycling—"the trend is to make it easier" to recycle, which also "makes it easier for more contaminants and outthrows" to get into the paper stream.
Contaminants and outthrows are "a pretty big problem, and it's been increasing" as the industry pushes toward higher recovery levels of all paper grades, says consultant Bill Moore of Moore & Associates (Atlanta). "There is no easy answer," Moore says—and for some, he adds, "there may be no answer."
What needs to be done to reduce contaminants, and who needs to do it? There's more than enough finger-pointing to go around. As Donna Roberts, a procurement manager with Atlantic Packaging Products (Scarborough, Ontario) puts it, "What part of the chain is going to accept the reasons [for the problem] and make the changes?" But recyclers might be asking another question, too: So long as they can find buyers for their paper, how pressing is this concern?
Singling Out Single-Stream
Single-stream collection has simplified the recycling process for households and offices: Toss all your recyclables—all grades of paper, as well as plastic, glass, aluminum, steel, and sometimes even electronics—in one bin and let somebody else sort it out later. That bin gets put at the curb or emptied into a larger container. A truck comes along on a regular basis and collection workers or a mechanical lift dumps the entire bin into the back. When the truck is full, the mixed load goes to the material recovery facility, which uses both automated and manual processes to separate the materials for further recycling.
Single-stream is rapidly growing in popularity, according to the American Forest & Paper Association (Washington, D.C.). In 2005, it was the customary method used by 29 percent of the U.S. population with curbside recycling; by 2007, single-stream had reached 50 percent of the population, AF&PA reports.
Single-stream advocates tout the system's many benefits. Collection is cheaper and faster than methods in which workers sort material as they throw it into the truck or methods that use separate trucks for different types of material. Municipalities can even use a "garbage" truck on a separate run to collect the recyclables. Single-stream processes translate into lower labor costs, fewer injuries, lower workers' compensation costs, and lower fuel costs, advocates say. Further, by making recycling easier for households and offices, more material will be recycled, and the greater volume offsets any decline in quality.
Paper recyclers and consumers aren't so sure that latter claim is true, however. Doug McLeod, director of recovered paper at Catalyst Paper Recycling (Richmond, British Columbia), has been buying ONP since 1991. He laments the timing of the rise of single-stream because it coincides with flat growth in newspaper circulation. In other words, single-stream might result in more recyclables, but it's not necessarily resulting in the collection of more newsprint. At the same time, it has shifted the burden of separating materials—and removing contaminants from the paper—to MRFs, where workers hustle to separate glass, plastic, cans, and paper, but inevitably they miss some. The greater the volume moving through the MRF, the more likely it is that contaminants and outthrows will slip through and become a problem for the mills.
McLeod goes as far as to wonder whether expansion of single-stream has been a step in the wrong direction. From the beginning, he says, the recycling industry urged homes and businesses to separate their recyclables—and they did. "Tens of millions of people all over North America sorted recyclables at home, and they did it for free," he says. "It's very sad for consuming mills of this material to learn that [people have] now been told not to."
Mills' Main Concerns
Contaminants are problematic for paper mills in several regards. First, the mill is paying for material it can't use and then must purchase additional fiber to replace the weight of the prohibitives. Second, it takes time, effort, and money to extract the contaminants from the paper supply. Third, the mill must dispose of the contaminants somehow, incurring further costs. Outthrows create a slightly different problem: When lower grades of paper are mixed in with higher grades, it can reduce the quality of the final product or force the mill to change its processes or inputs to compensate. All this is hardly in keeping with the standard business-school model, McLeod says: "Any raw material for any business should be clean and easy to deal with."
The scope of the contaminant problem seems to be growing. The ideal has always been zero contaminants and zero outthrows. In practice, the standard once was 1 percent contaminants, McLeod says. Now, in his experience, contaminants average 7 percent or so. Atlantic Packaging reports that outthrows—which for them include paper bags and OCC—now constitute up to 18 percent by weight of incoming paper shipments. Prohibitives such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, household refuse, glass, wood, and metals constitute up to 10 percent of a shipment by weight. That's twice the amount of prohibitives the company was seeing a few years ago, threatening product quality and raising the company's landfill costs.
Bill Sacia, a senior research engineer with Weyerhaeuser Co. (Federal Way, Wash.), has analyzed the contaminant and outthrow problem at the company's NORPAC newsprint mill in Longview, Wash. In a January 2006 article in the TAPPI Journal, he and co-author Jay Simmons, also with Weyerhaeuser, reported that pulper rejects—primarily plastics, tin, glass, and aluminum—had increased 800 percent since the facility's suppliers began accepting commingled recyclables.
Sometimes a railcar shipment of recovered paper contains the equivalent of a full bale of aluminum cans, says Pete Grogan, manager of market development with International Paper (Auburn, Wash.). At the going rate (this summer) for UBCs of about $1,800 a ton, that's a lot of money to throw away—and the material does get thrown away, not recycled. "State-of-the-art paper mills are not designed to sort materials," Grogan points out, so the potentially recyclable metal and plastic ends up with all the other contaminants in a landfill. As Sacia and Simmons point out in the TAPPI Journal article, that's an expense for the mill and a lost revenue opportunity for the recycler, who collected those materials with the intention of processing and selling them.
The worst contaminant of all, Grogan says, is glass. This common recyclable creates what he calls "the sandblasting effect." The glass breaks into shards, pellets, or granules that wreak havoc with equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars to repair or replace. "We spend a lot of time and money on new equipment," says David Knight, director of fiber procurement at SCA Americas (Neenah, Wis.) "We end up buying more of what we already have." Sacia and Simmons' research found a fourfold increase in annual maintenance costs they attributed primarily to glass in the paper stream. Their research put the total costs for the NORPAC mill of more contaminants and outthrows—including additional maintenance, reject disposal, and the purchase of additional fiber—at more than $2.5 million a year.
The Role of the Markets
At some point, North American mills will decide they've had enough—they don't want paper shipments with such high levels of contaminants. Sacia says Weyerhaeuser has dumped a supplier who couldn't provide better quality. As long as supply keeps up with demand for recycled paper, says Catalyst's McLeod, "there's no point in taking 15 percent contaminants. You might as well go home. Close up shop." Indeed, some worry that North American mills will shut down rather than incur the expense of cleaning up the stream.
With U.S. newspaper circulation flat and supply uncertain, however, mills are tempted to take what they can get. They can try to convince suppliers to provide cleaner material—but right now the suppliers have other options. If they can't meet North American mills' standards, they just look for buyers overseas. "When there's so much demand and prices are rising," McLeod explains, "when there's a lineup at their door to buy material … there is little incentive for the [paper suppliers] who have sorting plants to put extra people on the sorting line." Mills may have a harder time finding what they need, so sometimes they have to settle for a lot of [junk] in the load, he says.
International Paper's Grogan puts it this way: "What you hear from a number of suppliers today is that they're making a good effort" to reduce contaminants and outthrows, "but if you don't want the paper, fine, [they'll] ship it to China." In that and other developing countries, labor costs are low enough to warrant busting open bales, re-sorting the material by hand, and finding a buyer for every possible commodity.
Exporting is a good alternative for paper recyclers in a red-hot world market, but if international demand wilts, pressure will mount throughout the North American supply chain to reduce contaminants and outthrows. Recyclers who still separate could benefit, McLeod predicts. They will have the good stuff, and if demand drops, they'll be well positioned to charge top prices. Of course, who knows whether mills will be willing and able to pay. "There's just not a lot of money in the industry, period, to be able to throw around," Atlantic's Roberts says.
Searching for Solution
Despite the booming export market, domestic paper recyclers still want to meet the needs of domestic mills. So what's the solution to the contaminants and outthrows problem? "That is a very good question," Roberts says, "and it's one we certainly are spending a lot of time pondering." Any solution won't be simple, says Recycling Services' Finn. "There is responsibility all along the chain." Vital to making the case is communicating—and overcommunicating—among collectors, local governments, MRFs, recyclers, and mills.
Starting at the consuming end, improved pulping, screening, and cleaning equipment at the mills will help, but retrofitting is expensive, says consultant Moore.
Mills such as Newark Group (Cranford, N.J.) do some of their own collection and separation, thus ensuring they get the quality they want. The company works with equipment manufacturers and its own MRFs, investing in more cleaning equipment to make sure its paper meets industry specifications, says Johnny Gold, senior vice president and a past president of PSI. The United States Gypsum Co. (Chicago) buys more than half of the OCC it needs for its sheet rock operations from retailers' back doors. The cartons are already flattened and bundled into bales and they're clean, without glass or other contaminants. "If you happen to be in a market where only single-stream is available, the only thing you can do is be very selective in what you take," counsels Steve Koehler, USG's secondary fiber manager. "Go to grades of paper that don't come through municipalities… . Go to your industrial sources and other sources of paper that has not been commingled with glass and other outthrows." Or, as Gold puts it, "The secret is working with your supplier."
Atlantic Packaging is talking to its suppliers about slowing down their lines to sort out the bad stuff more effectively. Single-stream represents "such a conglomerate of various items" that screening equipment hasn't managed to keep up, Roberts says. She's not optimistic about this approach, though, because working more slowly "comes at a cost" to the recyclers, she acknowledges. "Once they slow down the machines, they're not getting the throughput that they need to get."
Going all the way back to the beginning of the recycling chain, some communities have tried a modification of single-stream: everything goes into the same truck except for glass. Weyerhaeuser's Sacia likes this approach. "If we can do that, a lot of the other contaminants aren't as big a deal," he says. But such a change requires education to remind everyone along the chain of the new procedures.
Municipalities might be open to a well-reasoned argument against single-stream. Mills have shown they're willing to forgo paper from municipal collections if they feel it doesn't meet their standards. If exporting becomes less attractive, domestic suppliers will have to sit up and take notice. Further, think about those contaminants—most of which are recyclable commodities. As Sacia puts it, if recycled material goes in the bin, to the MRF, and then to the paper mill—and then it ends up in a landfill—that's not recycling. When you consider the fuel used to transport those materials to every stage of the process, this might actually be worse for the environment and the community than just tossing those materials in the trash.
Some think resistance to single-stream recycling is futile. "You can't really fight single-stream, in my opinion," says Greg Cottrell, vice president for recovered fiber of Caraustar Industries (Austell, Ga.) "It's a megatrend, and it's gaining momentum and probably even has reached critical mass." If that's the case, MRFs, recyclers, and mills will most likely end up sharing the costs of cleaning up the stream. •
Marc Hequet is a writer based in Minneapolis.
Single-stream collection, greater processing volumes, and strong overseas demand for mixed paper are resulting in more contaminants in the recovered paper supply, causing concerns for North American mills.