Paper Recycling — Saving Money, Sanity
“Because of that, I had limited resources on my dock,” Vandenburg says. “So I had a local company that we’d call, which would then send a truck over (for pickup) within the hour. We were really being serviced for convenience reasons.”
Mossberg’s three blower systems went live roughly two years ago. One removes the scrap from three paper cutters, a second handles four folders, and the third tends to two stitching lines. An accumulator is mounted above the baler and an air filtration system minimizes the dust that’s created. The ROI is less than two and a half years.
The up side for Mossberg is a 300 percent gain in scrap material return. Vandenburg watched the value surge from $40 a ton for Gaylords to $110 per ton for baled waste, depending on the mix.
Another benefit that’s difficult to measure in hard costs is the savings in operator time spent moving Gaylords around, according to Vandenburg. An operator making more than $20 an hour doesn’t have to spend time changing out boxes.
Maintenance has been minimal. Fittings on the blower units get greased and the motors are inspected—fairly straightforward business. On weekends, the system is programmed to send large amounts of air through the filters, clearing out dust.
“The filtration system does a wonderful job keeping our area clean, but you’ve got to maintain the filter system,” Vandenburg says. “Otherwise, they get clogged and lose their efficiency.”
Manual No More
Another company that was handling scrap manually was Progress Printing in Lynchburg, VA. According to Stan Smith, vice president of manufacturing, the process of transporting material in containers to the balers in order to make paper bricks was labor prohibitive.
Progress Printing turned to Kernic Systems for its recycling system, which has two cyclones and occupies roughly 2,500 square feet. Kernic designed a system tailored toward Progress Printing’s volume of one million pounds per month.
