Odds are that unless you're a farmer, a forester or a miner, you don't think of yourself as a producer of raw materials. Nevertheless, to Jim Burke at the Southeast Paper Manufacturing Co., you either are, or easily could be.
Burke runs a newspaper recycling plant in Dublin, Ga., and to keep the plant operating efficiently he needs 1,800 tons of old newspapers each day.In fact, the newspaper that you're reading right now is his basic raw material. If you recycle it, you are a critically important producer of his raw materials.
Building a newspaper recycling plant today means an investment of more than half a billion dollars. Naturally, the people who run these plants want to make sure that they can get enough old newspapers (ONP) to justify such a large investment.
To them the newspapers you and your community recycle are a precious resource. In the past year, newspaper recycling plants paid as much as $200 a ton for ONP. Today the price is closer to $50 a ton, but it's still a valuable commodity.
"We like it when the price is low," Burke says, "but not too low. We want the price high enough so that communities will want to recycle."
If you were to visit the Dublin facility, you'd start at the receiving area - it's about the size of a couple of football fields. This area holds more newspapers than you've ever imagined in your life. A conveyor belt takes the newspapers from the receiving area to the pulper, a machine that resembles a cement mixer in size and color.
Inside, however, the pulper is more like a giant blender. It uses high speed rotating blades powered by 500 horsepower motors to mix the ONP with water and break it down into individual fibers. By the end of their brief stay in the pulper, the individual fibers are each no larger than an eyelash.
From the pulper, the water-and-newspaper mixture (it's called a slurry) flows through a series of screens and filters. These remove impurities such as glass, staples or sand. Next, the slurry goes through machines that wash the ink from the fibers, using detergents similar to what you might use in a home washing machine.
The slurry next goes to drying machines, and then on to the papermaking machine.
The papermaking machine looks something like a blocklong series of giant rolling pins. The rollers press the individual fibers together so tightly that portions of the fibers will actually share their atoms. The fibers become bonded together with atomic force as the paper machines spews out 45 miles of finished paper each hour.
Next time you're in a car doing 45, imagine producing mile after mile of a 30-foot wide swatch of paper going at that speed.
The entire process, from pulper to finished rolls of newsprint takes only four hours. The actual time in the paper machine is only about a minute.
If you're not already recycling your newspapers, why not give it a try? If you save all your newspapers for a year, you'll have saved a tree. You'll also prolong the life of your local landfill, since ONP make up as much as 8 percent of the space used in landfills.
And, too, you'll be a hero to people like Burke. So, go ahead and recycle all your old newspapers. You can have the title of Important Producer of Raw Materials.