Paper trail: Recycling gets real on the Columbia River

Editor’s note: Got questions about recycling? We’ve got answers. Times editorial board members and Opinion columnists Melissa Davis and Josh Farley visited a Longview mill to see how paper and cardboard are born anew as part of an occasional series on the state’s current mishmash of a recycling system.

Josh: In our quest to become better recyclers, Melissa, I found myself pitying the ephemeral life of a pizza box. One minute, it is safeguarding an oven-hot, saliva-inducing pie. The next, it is grease-stained cardboard with no job prospects.  

Melissa: You could say that about the life span of so much packaging today, Josh. Single-use. Helpful one day; threatening the lives of sea mammals (charismatic and not) in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the next. Thankfully, paper products, including your pizza’s container, are biodegradable and recyclable — a chance to be born again.

Josh: That was the impetus for our latest trek to a paper mill in the timber town of Longview earlier this month: Of all the things we put in our recycling bins, what is actually being reconstituted and made anew?

Melissa: Spoiler alert: It isn’t plastic. More than 90% of the stuff is never recycled, according to the EPA. By contrast, around two-thirds of paper and other “fiber” products (yes, Everest-size mountains of Amazon boxes) get another shot at life.

Josh: To see it for ourselves, we took the train to Cowlitz County and visited the North Pacific Paper Company, NORPAC for short. The mill, in operation 24/7, produces a 30-foot-wide sheet of paper that could stretch from Seattle to Miami — every day.

Melissa: Their business, founded in 1979, was built on selling newsprint, including to The Seattle Times. (Listen up, kids: That used to be something a mill could do, full-time.) It relied on wood chips, the discarded detritus from the trees harvested and milled at nearby Weyerhaeuser. But the days of cranking out 15 million tons of newsprint per year are over, as sad as we are to see it, and the output is now just 1 million tons per year. The waste haulers and the people who run the MRFs — materials recovery facilities — have definitely noted the downturn in newsprint and the sudden surge in the cardboard.

Josh: What could they do? Of all things, it was China’s sudden rejection of imported waste in 2018 that resulted in an upheaval of the entire global garbage market. Company leaders thought: What if mills like NORPAC could take on the paper and cardboard?

Melissa: NORPAC’s motto about being a company of thinkers was illustrated by this. In 2022, the company dedicated a $50 million state-of-the-art drum pulper to spin and separate usable pulp from all the other stuff that cannot be recycled. Picture a massive front-loading washing machine. Inside, spikes and the delightfully named baffles break down the paper to shreds and water reduces it to pulp. A massive pipe pushes that pulp to the company’s nearby paper factory.   

Josh: It was a fitting follow-up to our visit to Recology’s MRF, or materials recovery facility, in Seattle. That’s the single-stream collection house for what customers of that company throw into the bins. The MRF is pretty good at separating paper and cardboard, but not perfect — not yet anyway. NORPAC buys those giant bales and feeds them to the drum pulper. It has a voracious, never-ending appetite for pulp, but is also able to belch out plastics, glass and other contaminants through an exit at the end of its rotating shaft.    

Melissa: Glass is the enemy of the drum pulper, damaging its insides. Which is too bad, as glass is one of those substances that otherwise can be broken down and reconstituted forever, with no loss of quality. (And not just into practical vessels; as we in the Northwest know, it makes beautiful art.) Instead, it heads for the landfill.

Josh: Which brings me back to pizza boxes. NORPAC was happy to take them, and other food-soiled cardboard. The trouble is, some area MRFs — including Recology and Waste Management — designate them for composting, as food waste can grow mold within MRFs that can contaminate their product.

Melissa: But if the MRFs won’t haul it, how can those old boxes ever make it there? What about residents who don’t get the memo, so they just chuck the boxes in the trash? And we don’t have enough time/space to wade into the fray over cups with plastic lining and the Great Shredded Paper Skirmish. NORPAC says it can take cups and shred, too.

Josh: Any solution will have to wait for the Legislature to reconvene in January. Recycling systems are a hodgepodge in Washington, as elsewhere. Most counties in the state have them; 11 still don’t. Those that do have their own rules about what they will collect. The result is a network that can include square pegs and round holes that, putting it mildly, won’t recycle your pizza box.

Melissa: Bills that attempted to fix the state’s recycling system, including putting some of the labor on the packagers, fell victim to a short session of the Legislature this year. But lawmakers will be back in January, and we sincerely hope they take another crack at how Washington can make it better.

Josh: In the meantime — and Monday being Earth Day, BTW — what can we do, Melissa?

Melissa: Glad you asked! I hope more people do. Some thoughts: Look to products and packaging that have proven themselves in this new recycling economy — our waste streams are treated as commodities, after all. Aluminum cans and paper products can be circular, that is, made into new things. And it’s profitable for companies to do so.

Josh: That’s the beauty of paper. It gets a chance to live again — at least seven times. That’s better than most materials. And it’s leaps and bounds better than plastics, whose polymers are very difficult to break down and make new — if they can be recycled at all.

Melissa: Plastics are such a Faustian bargain. (Sorry, I minored in English.) Yes, they’re cheap and convenient, but like a raccoon that crashes your dinner party, they get into everything: our rivers and oceans, and even our bloodstream, in the form of micro- and nano-plastics. Yuck.

Josh: I have hope that, in the next year, our state can find ways to reduce that plastic waste. Remember the Legislature’s ban on single-use plastic bags in grocery stores? The result of that has been thicker plastic bags going to landfills. NORPAC and other mills can now churn out paper bags for groceries. You shouldn’t have to shop at Whole Foods to expect paper bags.

Melissa: I think we also need, in this conversation, a return to the first two of the three Rs that many of us learned in school: reduce and reuse when you can. (Write or print on both sides of a piece of paper! Make a note on your cocktail napkin — with context for the next day, of course. Hey, this is a full-service article.)

Josh: 100%. Any kind of recycling takes immense resources over time: water, electricity, human power. NORPAC’s perch on the Columbia means it has access to roughly 10 to 15 million gallons of water per day to recycle and make paper. That process also consumes a lot of energy; fortunately, nearby Cowlitz County’s PUD brings the bulk of its electricity from the dams of the Bonneville Power Administration.

Melissa: So reducing how much packaging you buy and reusing what you do get is still the best way to help. But when you can recycle paper, it’s pretty neat that we’re not logging swaths of the Pacific Northwest to make paper bags. We’re taking the ingredients from your trash and piles of chips. And remaking the fiber again and again, into bags and boxes and wrappers and mailers. Speaking of boxes, they’re going to get even better for consumers and recyclers. There’s a lot going on in the “box R&D space,” which, I kind of hate to admit, sounds like both a band and an interesting area of research.

Josh: Hey Melissa, I’ll admit I’ve worked up an appetite. Up for lunch?

Melissa: What are you thinking?

Josh: I know this great pizza joint.