Eco - Local Eco News

POSTED: Sunday, Sep. 21, 2008

Where documents end up after they're recycled

According to Peter Rosco, general manager for Sound Shredding & Recycling, which handles the majority of paper shredding in Whatcom County, when you slide confidential documents into one of his company’s locked containers at work, you start a process that will send them through shredders, bales, blenders and strainers to be re-pulped into paper products sold at local grocery stores.

1. Whatcom County customers fill 65-gallon tubs or 55-gallon barrels at their worksites with papers. Sound Shredding & Recycling drivers pick up the tubs and barrels along with boxes of confidential documents daily, weekly or as often as they fill up.

2. Once the tub or barrel reaches the Sound Shredding & Recycling plant in Bellingham, workers dump the documents into a gaylord, a cubic-yard sized cardboard box on a pallet that can be moved easily.

3. A tipper dumps the gaylord’s documents onto a conveyor belt that pours 12,000 pounds of paper per hour into the shredder, says Sound Shredding & Recycling General Manager Peter Rosco.

4. Another conveyor belt moves the shredded paper into the baler, which compresses it into a wire-bound 1,200-pound bale. Semi-trucks ship the bales 350 miles to the Georgia-Pacific mill in Halsey, Ore.

5. At the mill, the bales are weighed on a conveyor belt and put into a blending machine called a re-pulper. Workers add caustic to the mixture to dissolve ink, sticky substances and other contaminants.

6. The re-pulper blends the paper with water into a bread-dough consistency, then uses screens, cleaners and centrifugal force to separate out any remaining contaminants, such as staples and plastic windows from envelopes.

7. During this process the paper separates into three byproducts. One waste stream goes to landfills, a second stream of concentrated wood waste goes to farmers to be spread on fields as a soil amendment, and a final reusable stream is sent to paper mills, which turn into new products.

8. Some of the pulp is processed into tissue paper at the mill. The rest goes into a press which squeezes the water out. Hydrogen per-oxide and hydrosulfide color strip and whiten the pulp.

9. The Halsey mill ships the clean pulp to other paper-product makers around the Pacific Northwest who turn it into writing paper, paper towels and tissues. Major retailers sell these products throughout the Pacific Northwest.