Paper Recycling Conference: Squeezed Out

Tissue mills and newsprint manufacturers are not the only ones scrambling to find alternative raw materials because of the smaller amount of old newspapers (ONP) on the market.

At a session at the 2011 Paper Recycling Conference, held in Chicago in late October, representatives of three other companies that consume ONP described how they are reacting to changes to their supply chain.

Alan Box of Pactiv Corp., Lake Forest, Ill., said that seven of the company’s 53 North American facilities make products from molded pulp, which relies upon ONP as a key ingredient.

Products such as molded pulp egg cartons, said Box, have traditionally “added another life to newspapers,” with No. 8 and No. 9 news grades being traditional supply staples.

Box said the business model of the molded pulp products plants have been threatened by ONP quality, price volatility and availability issues. Regarding availability, “A couple of our plants came close to running out of material this year,” said Box, noting that in some cases these plants were down to five days worth of inventory.

Quality and price volatility issues “present a margin problem,” said Box, “as to how we stay profitable and deliver the products our customers need.” If quality and supply problems persist, said Box, “we’ll have to introduce a new sustainable grade, whether it’s box cuttings or something else, to go into our egg cartons and other products.”

Beth Royse of the insulation company US GreenFiber LLC, Charlotte, N.C., said the company has long produced a line of building insulation products using ONP as the key feedstock. “The quality of the material over the last five years has changed extensively,” she commented.

Among the alternatives GreenFiber has explored is the use of telephone directories as feedstock, although Royse noted that the production of phone books “also is down 30 percent this year.”

As a way of addressing contaminants in the ONP stream, the company has “added processing equipment at our plants to clean [the material] further.”

GreenFiber also has started a recycled paper collection program with about “5,000 bins on the ground and 12 front-loading trucks” to collect what will ideally be a clean ONP and telephone directory stream within a 60-mile radius of the company’s insulation manufacturing plants.

Judy Haney of Boise Inc., Boise, Idaho, says the paper company’s mills that produce premium recycled-content printing and writing papers have relied primarily on office paper as a key fiber grade.

Haney said adhesives and mixed shredded paper in bales are among the problematic materials in Boise’s papermaking process. Sorted white ledger produced at single-stream plants often does not meet spec, said Haney. “There really is no turning back once materials are commingled,” she commented.

The 2011 Paper Recycling Conference, Partnered with the PSI (Paper Stock Industries Chapter of ISRI), was Oct. 23-25 in Chicago.