Reprocessed paper

>> How old boxes and stationery turn up on your roof and in your bathroom

by PHILIP PREVILLE

Of the 50,000 tons of material that Montrealers will recycle this year, about three-quarters of it will be paper. Not surprisingly, more than half of the 90,000 square feet at the city's north-end sorting centre is dedicated to handling paper products.

But you can't just bundle all sorts of paper together; there are specific markets for particular paper products. As a result, 24 employees lining the conveyor belt busily sort through it, dropping specific types of paper into their own special bins through specially marked holes in the floor. From there it gets compressed and shipped away--and it all comes back in forms you might not expect.

Newspaper: Newsprint (pictured top-right) is the easiest to sort because there's more of it than anything else; it's also the easiest to recycle. Companies like Daishowa purchase thousands of tons of old newsprint every year: they mash it into a pulp, skim the ink off the top, and make more newsprint. Daishowa sells much of its newsprint in the USA, where most states require it to be at least 35 per cent recycled material. There are no such requirements in Canada, but Daishowa's Brian Hutchinson says all the newsprint that comes off their rolls is at least 25 per cent recycled.

As for the non-recycled pulp, claims Hutchinson: "We don't cut down trees for pulp anymore. A while ago, we started buying left-over wood chips from lumber mills for new pulp. The system worked so well, we bought a bunch of lumber mills."

Mixed paper: Office stationery--printer paper, envelopes and so on--are sorted and sold separately. The biggest local buyer of mixed paper is Emco, which purchases about 7,500 tons annually. They pulp it down (never bothering to remove the ink) and turn it into a thick, flexible cardboard. Then they dip it in asphalt, coat one side with pebbles, dip it in asphalt again, cut it into squares and--voila!--it becomes roofing shingles.

Cardboard: The sorting centre supplies cardboard to numerous companies. Unlike newsprint, cardboard (pictured bottom-right) is turned into more cardboard using 99 per cent recycled fibres. Daishowa buys it and makes, among other things, the cardboard liner inside the cap of your mayonnaise jar. Another company, Sonoco, turns it into those cardboard spools at the core of toilet-paper rolls.

Final factoid: You can now throw your Oasis juice containers (the one-litre-sized cardboard ones with aluminium on the top and bottom) into the recycling. Alas, they're not recyclable--not yet, anyway. The company that makes them buys them all back from the sorting centre, and is currently trying to figure out a way to make them reusable. : Next week: plastic

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