EPRC: Buyers Concerned About Quality

Recovered fiber buyers for paper mills can agree on one thing—when they buy fiber, they would like to receive 100 percent paper and 0 percent metal, plastic or dirt.

Unfortunately, a panel of mill buyers at the 2007 European Paper Recycling Conference cited quality issues relating to contaminants as a foremost concern that can make their jobs difficult.

Chris White of Aylesford Newsprint Ltd. in the United Kingdom is particularly suspicious of fiber collected curbside via commingled methods. He said that while paper collected in a segregated fashion yields only about .5 percent discernible contaminants (such as tin cans and plastic bottles), bales of paper that derived from commingled collection are demonstrating from 5 to 9 percent contamination rates.

Said White of material coming from commingled material recovery facilities (MRFs) in the United Kingdom, “It’s generally dirty, it’s always damp, and it always smells. God only knows what it smells like when it gets to China.”

In terms of contaminants, White also said material coming from commingled MRFs “always contains some glass.” All contaminants affect yield, noted White, but glass has the added detraction of wearing down the expensive, stainless steel slotted screens paper mills use to keep contaminants out of the finished product.

White remarked that it is possible to get better quality material out of commingled or single-stream MRFs. On average, MRF owners in the United States invest more in sorting equipment compared to MRFs in the U.K., which, on average, have not yet experienced that level of investment, according to White.

White concluded by saying that mill companies such as Aylesford will continue to encourage dual-stream and source separated collection as the best way to ensure a quality supply.

The volume of collection has been a critical concern for Nuno Messias of Europac, which produces cardboard in Spain and Portugal. Those two nations now need to import some 500,000 tons of recovered paper each year to feed their growing mill capacity.

Importing fiber has led Messias and Europac to some of the same concerns that White expressed regarding the quality of recovered fiber. From Europac’s perspective, the quality of fiber being received “has degraded,” said Messias.

Messias proposed standards and a system to measure incoming fiber so that paperstock plants and MRFs can be held accountable for the quality and yield of the bales they produce. “We need to agree to those standards; we’re all in the same boat,” Messias said of mills and their recovered fiber suppliers.

Graham Moore, a United Kingdom-based consultant for Pira International, led off the session by demonstrating how rapidly boosted Chinese demand for recovered fiber this decade has provided an outlet for the increased amounts of fiber being collected in the European Union.

Moore also touched upon commingled collection as a two-sided coin offering a way to increase tonnage collected while also potentially diminishing the quality of recovered fiber. “We have these two driving forces that are not taking to each other,” he commented.

The 2007 European Paper Recycling Conference, organized by the Recycling Today Media Group, was held in at the Hilton Amsterdam Oct. 3-5.