Written Record: Columbia River Recycling Becomes Reality | Melissa Davis and Josh Farley

Editor’s note: Have questions about recycling? We already have the answer. Times editorial board members and Opinion columnists Melissa Davis and Josh Farley visited a Longview factory to see how paper and cardboard are being reborn. Part of an occasional series about the state’s current disorganized recycling system.

Josh: In our quest to become better recyclers, Melissa, I find myself empathizing with the short life of the pizza box. One minute, it’s protecting a mouth-wateringly hot piece of pie. Next, it’s grease-covered cardboard with no job prospects.

Melissa: Josh, you could say that about the longevity of so much packaging today. Single use. Helping one day; threatening the lives of marine mammals (charismatic and non-charming) in the Pacific Garbage Patch the next.Thankfully, paper products, including pizza containers, are biodegradable and A chance to recycle.

Josh: This was the impetus for our latest trek to a paper mill in the lumber town of Longview earlier this month: Of all the stuff we put in our recycling bins, what is actually being reconstituted and remade?

Melissa:Spoiler alert: it’s not plastic. According to the EPA, more than 90% of materials are never recycled. By comparison, about two-thirds of paper and other fiber products (yes, Amazon boxes the size of Mount Everest) get another life.

Josh: To see it firsthand, we took the train to Cowlitz County and visited the Northern Pacific Paper Company, or NORPAC.The plant operates 24/7, producing 30-foot-wide sheets that can stretch from Seattle to Miami every day.

Melissa: Their business was founded in 1979 and is based on selling newsprint, including to The Seattle Times. (Listen, kids: This was once something a factory could do full-time.) It relies on wood chips, discarded scraps from trees harvested and milled by nearby Weyerhaeuser. But the days of producing 15 million tons of newsprint a year are over, and as sad as we are, production is now just 1 million tons a year. Waste haulers and operators of MRF material recovery facilities have certainly noticed the decline in newsprint and the sudden surge in paperboard.

Josh: What can they do? Among them, China suddenly refused to import garbage in 2018, which led to drastic changes in the entire global garbage market. Company leaders thought: What if a factory like NORPAC could produce paper and cardboard?

Melissa: This is evident in NORPAC’s motto of being a company of thinkers. In 2022, the company invested in a state-of-the-art drum pulper worth $50 million to spin usable pulp and separate it from all other materials that cannot be recycled. Picture a giant front-loading washing machine. Inside, the spikes and delightfully named baffles break the paper into pieces while water breaks it down into pulp. A huge pipeline carries the pulp to the company’s nearby paper mill.

Josh: This was a fitting follow-up to our visit to Recology’s MRF, or Materials Recovery Facility, in Seattle. This is a single-stream collection chamber where the company’s customers throw in their bins. MRF is very good at separating paper and cardboard, but it’s not perfect by any means. NORPAC purchases these bales and feeds them into a drum pulper. It has an insatiable appetite for pulp, but can also spray plastic, glass and other contaminants through the outlet at the end of the rotating shaft.

Melissa: Glass is the enemy of the drum pulper and can damage its interior. That’s too bad, because glass is a substance that can be permanently broken down and reformed without losing quality. (And not just into practical containers; as we in the Northwest know, it can create beautiful art.) Instead, it goes to the landfill.

Josh:Which brings me back to the pizza box. NORPAC happily accepts them and other food-soiled cardboard. The problem is that some regional MRFs, including Ecology and Waste Management, designate them for composting because food waste can grow mold within the MRF, contaminating its products.

Melissa: But how do those old boxes get there if the MRF doesn’t haul it? What about the residents who didn’t get the memo and just tossed the boxes in the trash? We don’t have enough time/space to wade into the conflict of plastic-lined cups and shredded paper. NORPAC says it can also hold cups and tear things apart.

Josh: Any solution would have to wait until the Legislature reconvenes in January. Washington’s recycling system, like elsewhere, is a hodgepodge. Most counties in the state have them; 11 still doesn’t work. Those who do collect something have their own rules. The result is a network of square pegs and round holes that, to put it mildly, won’t recycle your pizza box.

Melissa: A bill seeking to fix the state’s recycling system, including turning some labor over to packers, fell victim to a brief session of the Legislature this year. But lawmakers will be back in January, and we sincerely hope they take another shot at how Washington can make things better.

Josh: In the meantime, Monday is Earth Day, and by the way, what can we do, Melissa?

Melissa: So glad you asked! I wish more people did this. Some ideas: Take a look at the products and packaging that have proven themselves in this new circular economy, where our waste streams are treated as commodities after all. Aluminum cans and paper products can be recycled, that is, made into something new. Doing so is profitable for the company.

Josh: This is the charm of paper. It has at least seven chances to be reborn. This is better than most materials. And it’s a huge improvement over plastic, whose polymers are difficult to break down and make new ones if they can be recycled.

Melissa: Plastic is a Faustian bargain. (Sorry, I minored in English.) Yes, they’re cheap and convenient, but like a raccoon that ruins your dinner, they permeate everything in micro and nano form: our rivers and oceans, even us of blood – plastic. nausea.

Josh: I hope next year our state can find a way to reduce plastic waste. Remember when the Legislature banned single-use plastic bags in grocery stores?The result of this is thicker Plastic bags will be sent to landfill. NORPAC and other factories can now mass-produce paper grocery bags. You don’t have to go to Whole Foods to buy paper bags.

Melissa: I think in this conversation we also need to go back to the first two of the three Rs that many of us learned in school: reduce and reuse whenever possible. (Write or print on both sides of a piece of paper! And of course, jot down context for the next day on your cocktail napkin. Hey, this is a full-service article.)

Josh:100%. Over time, any form of recycling requires significant resources: water, electricity, manpower. NORPAC’s location on the Columbia River means it has access to approximately 1,000 to 15 million gallons of water per day to recycle and make paper. The process also consumes a lot of energy; fortunately, the nearby Cowlitz County PUD gets most of its electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration’s dams.

Melissa: So reducing the amount of packaging you buy and reusing the ones you get is still the best way to help. But when you can recycle paper without clearing vast tracts of land in the Pacific Northwest to make paper bags, that’s pretty neat. We pull ingredients from your trash and piles of potato chips. Fibers are reprocessed again and again into bags, boxes, wrapping paper and mailing bags. Speaking of boxes, they will provide a better service for consumers and recyclers. There’s a lot going on in the box development space, and I’m a bit reluctant to admit it, but it sounds like both a band and an interesting field of research.

Josh: Hey Melissa, I admit I have a voracious appetite. Went to lunch?

Melissa: what’s on your mind?

Josh: I know this great pizza place.