From bin to box plant: the journey to recycle a newspaper
Every weekday, around 31,000 copies of The Dominion Post are torn from their packaging, their words consumed by hungry eyes over coffee or on the train to work. On Saturdays, that number climbs to 38,000. What happens after readers are done with the crossword? Kate Green follows a copy of the paper from the recycling bin to a new life.
The first thing that hits you is the noise; the churning, grinding, and scraping of metal against metal, the beeping of a reversing truck, and the crunching of plastic, paper and tin being flung around, squashed, and sorted.
More than 120 tonnes of rubbish arrive at the Oji Fibre Solutions plant in Seaview each day, from residential kerbside collections all over the Wellington region.
There are hundreds of newspapers in the mix, with more than 16 tonnes made up of paper and cardboard.
Group manager Philip Millichamp says their paper recycling offshoot Fullcircle collects about half of New Zealand’s waste paper, more than 260,000 tonnes each year.
About a third of NZ’s paper recycling ends up at one of Oji’s paper mills, in Kinleith in Tokoroa, or Penrose in Auckland, with both sites processing more than 90,000 tonnes each per year.
A copy of The Dominion Post, thrown into a recycling bin in Wellington city, makes the short journey from kerb to factory in a rumbling truck, one of 45 to arrive at Seaview each day.
Tyke Recycling and Contracting general manager Brendan Walker, who is contracted to Oji to run the Seaview plant, says about 30 per cent of recycling came in council bags, the rest loose from wheelie bins.
You can always pick out the new truck drivers, Walker said. They park in the way.
Recycling is emptied onto the factory floor, scooped up by a front loader, and fed onto a conveyor belt, a little at a time to prevent overloading the people sorting it by hand along the conveyor belt.
As a copy of The Dominion Post rolls along on the first of many conveyor belts, up ahead workers are sorting it by hand.
There are usually 32 staff on the factory floor, working in different shifts between 5am and 7pm, Walker says. Staff switch positions during the day, to ensure nobody is stuck on the same task too long.
Some items are thrown down chutes to go elsewhere in the factory. Some of it is clearly not recyclable – old food, half-full cans, even dirty nappies.
‘‘People put gross stuff in their recycling,’’ Walker says. ‘‘And real people have to deal with it.’’
The newspaper rolls by, and drops off the end onto a ‘‘star screen’’, a tilted rack of spinning cogs, 16 per shaft across 24 shafts, flicking paper into the air, and over the top. The newspaper is light and large enough to be flicked upwards by the tumbling motion. Anything heavy or three-dimensional, like cans or small pieces of card, falls below.
On the next rack, the whirling stars are smaller and denser, 32 on each of the 24 shafts to catch smaller pieces. Anything too small, like paper tags or business cards, fall below to go to the landfill.
Our newspaper continues along a conveyor to a bailing machine, which Walker says compresses around 100 tonnes of paper and card a day. The bales will be loaded onto a truck, and then travel to Auckland. At the Penrose paper mill, the waste goes through a washer with warm water, which turns it into pulp and separates foreign objects, like cellotape or staples, which are sent to the landfill.
From there, the recycled paper is transferred to a box plant to make more cardboard products like cup holders, and boxes. Solid cardboard boxes can be remade from the same materials seven times. Millichamp says from bale to box to customer, the whole process takes about three weeks.
What can I recycle?
Newspapers and magazines, egg cartons, office paper and envelopes, domestic junk mail, cereal boxes, toilet paper rolls, cardboard boxes, including pizza boxes (but remove pizza scraps and cheese residue), brown corrugated cardboard books (remove plastic cover).
Note: It can’t be recycled if it is waxed or foil-backed, has plastic or food on it, or if it is smaller than a credit card.