Harvesting The Urban Forest

Scarcity of raw materials is a concern for many recyclable consuming mills, and strategies to protect against these shortages are many. For Weyerhaeuser Co., Federal Way, Wash., the decision was an ambitious one: Increase the amount of recovered fiber it collected at its recycling plants by 100 percent by the end of this decade. An ambitious plan? Yes. Possible? "Very possible," according to Weyerhaeuser.

Weyerhaeuser Co., was founded in 1900 as a forest products concern now focusing on wood fiber, pulp and paper. The company’s recycling business was founded in 1974. Since its inception, Weyerhaeuser’s recycling division has grown to include 28 plants in United States. and Canada. While the company handles more than 50 different grades of recovered fiber and collected more than 2 million tons last year, the company uses about half to fiber its own mills, while selling the rest on the open market.

George Henson, vice president of Weyerhaeuser Recycling, has been with the company for more than 25 years, and says the company, although publicly traded, feels more like a family business. People know each other and share in certain values.

"The values and the ethics and the kinds of things we stand for is one of the reasons that a lot of us are here," says Henson. "It certainly helps us in the recycling business to have the kind of values that Weyerhaeuser has – it helps support us as we go out into the communities to work with people. We want to do business in a straightforward, open and honest way, to be above-board and fair with both our supply customers and our marketing customers. If we sign a contract or if we agree to something, we’re going to fulfill it."

Perhaps contributing to the family feel is the continued close involvement of some members of the Weyerhaeuser family with the company.

"George Weyerhaeuser (the great grandson of Frederick, founder of Weyerhaeuser) is still chairman of the board, George Weyerhaeuser Jr. is president of Weyerhaeuser Canada, and we have a couple of other family members, so we still have a Weyerhaeuser presence," explains Henson.

While Weyerhaeuser Recycling is wholly owned by Weyerhaeuser Co., it operates as a separate business, Henson explains.

"The company is split up into sectors, and we are part of the pulp, paper and packaging sector," he says. "We have everything it takes to operate as a stand-alone business, although we work with the other businesses to make sure we’re not doing anything that creates problems for them."

Weyerhaeuser Recycling specializes in mixed office or mixed residential papers, newsprint and old corrugated containers, according to Henson, but the company also collects aluminum and plastics for some customers, and is starting to explore the emerging wood waste commodity market.

"We’re looking at some opportunities as a lot of solid wood is being banned from landfills," he says. "We’re trying to provide another alternative, trying to get that material into some higher-end-use products. A lot of it now is going into particleboard kinds of material, but we’re also looking at finger jointing, studs and other products."

If high-end uses for wood waste are not available, the company will use wood for various other applications, listed in descending order of preference and value-added: chips going into primary paper manufacturing, structural wood, particleboard or fuel.

"We’ll do the same thing we do in paper," says Henson, "where we start at pulp substitutes and work our way down to sorted white ledgers and on down into the stream, ending up with just a mix that would be used in insulation and other applications."

"In all aspects of the company, resource conservation is a strong ethic, so getting to the utilization of 100 percent of our product is our goal," adds Jason Plut, communications manager for Weyerhaeuser Recycling.

The company’s goal, agrees Henson, is to use everything to the fullest extent, avoiding waste wherever possible. "And we are talking, in recycling, in terms of harvesting the urban forest, and looking at the kinds of things it takes to get the materials that people have historically put into landfills out of the landfills and into a better use."

For some companies saying the goal is to reduce waste may be a casual plaudit. However, Weyerhaeuser Recycling is backing up this statement by offering it as a new service. The company’s Waste Integration Service Center provides full service recycling and waste hauling services for its customers. The center acts as a broker for waste disposal, finding the customer the lowest-cost waste disposal service as well as maximizing its recycling and waste reduction efforts.

"We’re offering our larger customers take-away for other types of recyclables in an effort to utilize the whole, and out of that, we work with the waste haulers," says Henson. "We want to utilize usable paper or usable wood or whatever comes out of there."

As part of that "whatever," the integrated service center has found uses for previously unusable products. For example, a company that produces cheese byproducts – previously a waste product – can now offer that material to a company that manufactures animal feed, says Henson.

Weyerhaeuser Recycling was motivated to start this program for several reasons, says Henson. The first is that customers want to deal with just one company for waste hauling and recycling, for the added convenience, and want to recycle as many products as possible as materials are increasingly banned from landfills. "Somebody has to provide the infrastructure for them to be good recyclers; working with other recyclers and working with waste haulers and whatever it takes to do that," says Henson.

"The other thing is that it’s enabling us to close the loop with some of our larger customers, particularly the containerboard packaging customers that are buying the boxes from us," he adds. "They want to ensure that the used boxes get back into the recycling system."

Henson insists that Weyerhaeuser Recycling is not competing with waste haulers, but is rather forming an alliance with haulers in finding ways to best use materials from the waste stream.

"We’re not in the waste hauling business and we’re not in the landfilling business," he says. "We are helping the customer to find a good use for what we can. There could be a potential for a fight between the waste hauler and the recycler, but I think we’re working together to accomplish this task. And yes, we want the paper out of it."

With talks of potential paper shortages at some point in the future, Henson admits that this is a strategy the company is taking to guarantee supply. "As you know, 50 percent of the paper we process is used in Weyerhaeuser facilities, and the rest of it is sold on the market to other customers. Our sales and marketing group looks for other customers to utilize the material that our plants can’t utilize today or might be able to utilize in the future."

Citizen consumers are demanding more recycled content in various products, but until recently there has not been adequate infrastructure to get materials "out of the waste stream and back into the materials stream," says Henson.

The paper industry as a whole was aiming to attain 40 percent use of recycled materials by the end of 1996, but actually achieved this goal at the beginning of 1994, says Henson, showing the industry's responsiveness.

"We’re now going for 50 percent reuse by the year 2000, and I think we’re probably going to meet that or be early with that, too. So, we conclude that the industry doesn’t really need regulation to accomplish those tasks – we are basically regulating ourselves."

In some cases, the economics do not justify using recycled fibers over wood pulp, says Henson, although this is partly because prices have been particularly high of late. "It is a cyclical business. If you look at the price of boxes or any of the products that come out of these facilities, it is cyclical, and so the price of recycled fibers will also be cyclical."

The price of scrap paper should be at a level that encourages recovery of additional material from the waste stream, says Henson, and the recent high prices have done that.

"A good example would be fine paper production," he explains. "If you look at how fine paper is consumed, about 50 percent of the fine paper produced ends up in the residential stream, and the real issue is, how do we get these materials out in some kind of source-separated way that allows us to use that material back in the production of a fine paper sheet, rather than a lower grade product?"

Weyerhaeuser’s NORPAC facility in Longview, Wash., actually recycles the equivalent of all newspapers generated daily in Washington, Oregon and Idaho – about 600 to 700 tons per day. To close the loop, Weyerhaeuser has developed strong partnerships with a number of newspaper publishers in the region to buy the recycled-content newsprint, produced to acceptable quality standards.

"That is one of the success stories in recycling," says Henson. "A year ago we had negative pricing in ONP and right now it’s certainly not that way. In fact, we now hear cases of a black market developing – people stealing papers off the curb and taking them somewhere and trying to get through the back door. We have to ask the state legislators to help us put in some protective measures. "

The President’s Executive Order 12-873 on Recycling, requiring federal agencies to step up their purchases of recycled products, has not made much difference in recycling from Weyerhaeuser’s perspective, except to set a tone for the country to develop more of a recycling ethic, says Henson.

"In some cases it probably helped," he says. "In others, I’m not sure. If we talked to some of the fine paper producers I think we’d find that most had already made a move to put in the amount of recycled content that was required anyway to meet customer demand."

One of the most hotly debated issues is the role, if any, the residential collection of paper grades, other than old newspaper, will have on future paper stock sources. Henson notes that interest by residents is great, but to a point. "People want to do what’s right, but only to a point. Convenience is a factor. When you start talking about newsprint, that’s relatively easy to segregate, aluminum cans are relatively easy to segregate, plastics are relatively easy, although it’s a lot more complicated than a lot of people think. But when you get to the direct mail, part of it is acceptable and part of it is not when you go back to a fine paper mill. "

The pursuit of office grades, especially with so many deinking projects coming on line, is creating the most concern. Only about 15 percent or 18 percent of the total fine paper produced ends up in the big offices where we could run an effective collection program as we know it today, Henson notes.

In comparison, Henson points out that more than 50 percent of the fine paper produced in this country ends up as part of the residential stream, in the form of direct mail, third class mail and other types of material.

"You’ve got the strip malls and the small businesses and a lot of the direct mail now that are starting to change the infrastructure. For example, QVC, the T.V. catalogue company, has changed the infrastructure – if I buy a pair of shoes off of that, I might have bought a pair of shoes from the store where 30 pairs of shoes came in one containerboard box. Now I’m getting one containerboard box with the shoebox inside it, and now that OCC is in my home and what do I do with it? Another tremendous change we’ve seen is with the use of computers at home, and, because of that, there is more paper usage at home. So, we’ve got to change the way we think about how to collect materials. The whole infrastructure is changing."

With such a significant part of the needed fiber in the home, Weyerhaeuser is one of many companies working on developing a cost-effective way to collect the material through alliances. While acknowledging the need to tap into the residential paper stream, Henson feels it also is important to access smaller facilities to do sorting, and move to larger facilities to do a more careful sortation.

As for residential paper, Henson says,"It’s really a matter of how we can do that, because you get food waste, you get some other materials in there, so you have to be so doggone careful about how you handle those materials. We don’t quite have all the answers yet, but we’re working on it."

Concern on the part of all paper companies is where they will get the fiber to supply their mills. While not on the top of the list, the issue of post-consumer mandates is one that hovers very close to the top for many of these same companies. Various groups have attempted to develop definitions for what is considered pre-consumer and what is post-consumer. At the same time, there are diverging opinions on whether definitions need to be developed at all.

"We do need some cleaner definitions, but are we tying people’s hands by worrying about that? Maybe we ought to just say ‘recycled paper’ and quit worrying whether it’s post- or pre-consumer. It’s an issue we need to work on, because sometimes it’s extremely difficult to tell what’s ‘pre’ and what’s ‘post.’"

A more recent issue has been the attempt by the Chicago Board of Trade to put recyclables, including paper, on a computer bulletin board listing grades and prices.

"I think it might make a difference in some papers. In the recycling business you’re caught between two worlds – the supply world and the consuming world – and you’re trying to take a commodity and do something with it to be suitable for a mill to use. With some of the trading, you would see some oddball lots and so forth where it might be helpful. We’re certainly watching it, and we will join the Chicago Board of Trade should they start trading paper.

 WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

"We’re out there dealing with people in an open, honest and straightforward way, and we’re not afraid to sign 20-year marketing agreements or whatever it takes to ensure there’s a home for recycled paper," continues Hensen. "We go through dips in the industry, and when those happen, the ‘briefcase recyclers’ run back in their holes, and do not want to deal with negative pricing. I’m saying we, the recycling industry, have an infrastructure out there, and that industry has invested a little more than $10 billion in using recycled fibers. In some cases we don’t have the luxury of being able to run back to wood pulp.

"A good example is the Cedar River Paper Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa," continues Henson. "That mill uses 100 percent OCC, and in Iowa there’s not a hell of a lot of wood within a 600 mile radius, so it is dependent on OCC as a fiber supply. When that facility operates, it has to run on OCC. So, that’s a commitment I think the industry has made to ensure that there will be a home for this.

"Over time, it gets to be a tradeoff between the capital invested up front and the price of the raw material over the longer haul. We’ll take the hit on the ups and downs on the price of the materials coming in, but money is saved on the front end by not having to put in a pulp mill, a recovery boiler, a wood-yard handling facility, etc. It’s thinking about the industry in a little different way, but it’s also thinking about OCC and ONP and mixed office as a fiber supply, and I think, historically, it hasn’t always been that way."

While Weyerhaeuser’s recycling business has been on a strong growth pattern as of late, the company is not considering scaling back its plants. The company is looking to target the Northeast, Midwest and Southeast for expansion. Indicative of this move, in June the company signed an agreement with Paper Stock Dealers Inc., a subsidiary of Sonoco Products, to increase the volume of recycled fiber collected in the mid-Atlantic and Southeastern region.

While the Chicago Board of Trade and new definitions of material are creating a new standard, other legal, regulatory and market-driven issues are starting to change the industry. Henson points out that with increased regulatory concerns, some facilities will be forced to switch the type of feedstock they use from virgin material to recycled fiber. "The desires of the public and surrounding communities may dictate this," he says. "And there must be a partnership with the communities. I think that’s part of the values and the ethics of Weyerhaeuser. We have a strong commitment to not only our shareholders and employees, but we also have strong commitment to the communities."