Ever wonder what happens to this newspaper after you’ve recycled it?
If you drop it at St. Albert’s recycling depot, it’ll probably end up in front of Ken Scott. The St. Albert resident sorts and ships hundreds of tonnes of recycled paper and cardboard a day at the Allied Paper Savers plant in Edmonton, some of which is from St. Albert’s recycling depot.
“I have to reach all the way from Winnipeg to Vancouver to get enough clean newspaper,” he said.
Scott is the general manager at Allied Paper Savers and someone on the front lines of Alberta’s recycling industry. The Gazette recently toured his sorting plant to find out what happens to paper when it’s recycled.
The paper process
Allied Paper Savers built its Edmonton sorting plant in around 2004, Scott said. The plant has close ties to the Can-Cell Industries insulation plant in Edmonton, which is owned by the same family.
Allied collects material exclusively from depots because of the high purity requirements of its clients, Scott explained. Blue bag systems often compress bags, which essentially welds their contents together and makes them very tough to separate.
It’s not impossible, though. Lorenzo Donini of GFL Environmental (the company that collects St. Albert’s blue bags) said his company’s sorting plant uses a combination of screens, density and optical sorters, people and other systems to sort blue bags into material streams with less than one per cent contamination – pure enough even to meet China’s strict requirements.
Paper accounts for about 70 per cent of what ends up in the blue bag around Edmonton, with GFL collecting about 2,000 tonnes of the stuff a month, Donini said. There’s less and less newsprint in the bag in recent years and more and more mixed containerboard (typically found in Amazon delivery boxes).
Allied processes about 50,000 tons of paper products a year, the company’s website reports. Every ton of paper they recycle preserves about 17 trees, 683 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water and 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
Scott said Allied takes in about 10 to 20 tonnes of paper and cardboard from the St. Albert depot a month.
All of that material gets dumped and stacked in piles and bales inside the cavernous sorting plant. Some of the messiest stuff is the shredded paper, which comes in cube-like bales that shed everywhere.
“I shipped it in, and half of that goes missing,” Scott said, commenting on the copious confetti around the bales.
Paper manufacturers have high standards when it comes to the recycled material they buy, Scott explained – one out-of-place bit of metal in a load could cause a fire if it's fed through a milling machine.
“That’s what someone thinks is newspaper,” Scott said, as he points out a steel lamp cord sticking out of a bale.
They also want specific types of paper, as the fibre length and ingredients in a paper item determine what you can do with it, he continued. White paper has strong but brittle fibres that make for good office paper, while cardboard can be turned into more cardboard or boxboard.
Newspaper manufacturers typically use fresh wood, but the long fibres in newsprint make for good insulation. A pound of newspaper can become six cereal boxes, six egg cartons or 2,000 sheets of writing paper, the Allied website reports.
Crews at the Allied sorting plant dump loads of material onto a conveyor belt and run it past a big magnet and sharp-eyed sorters to pick out any improperly sorted materials. Finished loads are then baled and shipped to manufacturers.
“Probably about 98 per cent of what comes through my door is recycled,” Scott said. Some of that remaining two per cent is straight-up garbage that people toss in recycling depots – he gets about a tonne of that a day.
Donini said GFL typically sorts paper from blue bags into cardboard, newspaper-like paper (which includes flyers) and a small amount of mixed paper. In what he acknowledged is a gross oversimplification of the process, most companies take paper from these streams, shred, soak and mix it to create something like paper maché, then press it into new paper products.
Donini said one of the main buyers of recycled paper nowadays is Amazon, which uses it in its boxes.
“It’s blown up the entire paper industry,” he said, as those boxes can be made from pretty much anything – glossy, cardboard, newsprint, even tissue paper. Amazon’s need for boxes is so great that companies are building new paper plants in America for the first time in years simply to make box material.
Much of the newspaper at the Allied plant gets shipped a few blocks away to Can-Cell – a dusty place filled with the near-deafening roar of milling machinery. Company vice-president of operations Karl Tiemstra said crews there do a second sweep of their newsprint for metals before grinding and mixing it with cardboard and various chemicals to produce fluffy insulation that’s about 85 per cent recycled paper. Every truckload of insulation sold represents about 13 tonnes of paper kept out of the landfill, the Allied website reports.
The state of the industry
Global markets for many recyclable materials have basically imploded due to China’s quality restrictions, as China was the main buyer of less-sorted material, said Christina Seidel of the Recycling Council of Alberta. North American companies are building better sorting plants to compensate, but for now the market is awash with material, particularly mixed paper.
“The actual revenue opportunity for all recycling right now is in the toilet,” Seidel said.
Prices might be down, but unlike the situation with plastic, there are still companies out there that buy and use recycled paper, Donini said.
“With plastics, we straight up have a physical problem,” he said, as there’s so much of the stuff we don’t have the infrastructure in place to handle it all.
With paper, it’s a money problem, he continued – low prices and high overseas quality requirements mean recyclers have to invest more into sorting plants, which means higher recycling costs.
“The capture rate on the global scale for paper is quite good,” he said, with about 70 to 80 per cent of paper recycled in developed nations.
While Scott favours depot collection as it results in higher quality, Donini said his research suggests depots collect about a tenth as much material as curbside systems, making them far more expensive per tonne.
Seidel, Scott and Donini agree cities could save money on and improve the quality of paper recycling by doing more source-separation – say, by having separate bins for paper and glass as B.C. does.
Simply keeping your containers separate from everything else would cut costs and do wonders for quality, Donini said. Still, he said he hasn’t found much appetite for such changes around Edmonton, even when he offered 20-per-cent discounts.
“(Councils) would rather spend the extra money and go for the convenience.”
Scott said it’s important for people to understand there are limits to paper recycling. Each time you recycle wood, its fibres get shorter and how you can use it gets more limited. Products like egg cartons and take-out cup holders are basically the end of the road, as the fibres in them are essentially dust.
“That’s when you need to talk waste-to-energy,” he said, or look to composting.
Donini said the best way for people to help out paper recyclers is to actually read what’s on the accepted list for their local recycling programs, especially when it comes to plastics.
“The number one place those junky plastic products end up going is into the paper stream and contaminating it,” he said, and that means more cost and more risk that a load of paper will be rejected and sent to the trash.
If you want this newspaper to live on when you’re through with it, in other words, pay attention to what you throw out with it.
