A new study of mill procurement officials reveals that 75 percent of them do not buy recovered paper from mixed waste processing centers. The survey was conducted by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI).
ISRI released preliminary results of a survey of North
American paper mill buyers about their thoughts and experiences with
materials from mixed waste processing centers. Mixed waste processing
centers advise their residential customers that there is no need to
separate recyclables from solid waste (including organics) prior to
collection, claiming that the valuable recyclables will be successfully
separated in a Material Recovery Facility (MRF), ISRI said.
Although
there have been other recent studies about mixed waste processing
centers, this is the first known study that exclusively solicited views
of recovered paper buyers regarding their opinions and views about the
ability to successfully use the recyclables sorted from such “one-bin”
programs.
“We gained an incredible amount of learning from the
survey participants regarding their experiences and preferences
concerning the procurement of recovered fiber for their paper mills,”
said Robin Wiener, president of ISRI. “In 2014, ISRI issued a policy
statement discouraging the use of one-bin collection systems due to
anecdotal statements and strong feelings from our member companies
regarding the degradation in quality of recyclables recovered from such
systems, but it wasn’t until the completion of this survey that we
finally gleaned hard data from paper mills about the poor quality and
contamination that they are actually experiencing, and the resulting
impact on their purchasing and sourcing decisions. It is clear from this
study that in communities where mixed-waste processing systems are put
in place, the recycling of paper is significantly diminished, both in
quality and quantity.”
Some highlights of the survey’s initial results include:
- 82 percent of respondents purchase recovered fiber for between one and six mills, and 49 percent of respondents purchase material in the range of more than 100,000 tons of recovered fiber per year, but less than 500,000 tons of recovered fiber per year.
- Of the respondents, 25 percent purchase “some” material from dirty MRFs, but these mills purchase less than 10 percent of their required tonnage from mixed waste processing centers.
- Of those that purchase recovered fiber from mixed waste processing centers, 70 percent find the quality to be worse than most other recovered paper, and 90 percent of those mill buyers have had to downgrade or reject the paper from the mixed waste processing centers at a higher rate than recovered paper from “regular” MRFs.
- Almost two-thirds of those surveyed feel that ISRI guidelines should contain a statement as part of its recovered paper specifications that states: “Paper recovered from one-bin programs, separated in mixed-waste processing centers, is not fit for use in USA paper mills.”