RECYCLING

Despite current financial and process failings of some deinking mills, the outlook for recycled fiber as a furnish source is generally positive

BY DON McBRIDE

Unrealistic Thinking Spurred Office Wastepaper Deinking Dilemmas

Four years ago, the trend in the pulp and paper industry was to own a deinking facility to process office wastepaper. Most paper companies wanted one, as well as some entrepreneurs with little pulp and paper experience. The new administration in the White House called for a 50% recycled content in printing and writing grade paper purchased by the U.S. Government. Environmental groups had new allies, and almost everyone jumped onto the recycling bandwagon.

All of a sudden, recovered office wastepaper was an "untapped resource"-no more landfilling of this valuable commodity. Almost every deinking equipment vendor in the world had the latest and greatest devices to remove ink and stickies. Most equipment vendors upgraded their pilot plant facilities or built new ones to prove their claims of "ours is the best." Chemical vendors joined in with similar claims of "our chemistry works best." Some even built their own pilot plant facilities to prove their point. Engineering and construction companies were right behind.

Many different processes were designed to deink 100% (mixed) office wastepaper to produce an end product very similar to virgin pulp in every way. Such processes were usually led by an individual equipment vendor.

The financial community joined in, with investors financing deinking facilities with tax-exempt bonds at low interest rates simply because the raw material was post-consumer waste, which would normally have gone to a landfill or incinerator. Money was available, but with one catch! Somebody had to guarantee the process, even though this was a volatile and risky industry.

Several wastepaper consultants were predicting that the price of recovered office wastepaper would stay low-under $100/ton-for many years. Pilot plant trails were carried out. Feasibility studies were made and R&D work was completed. Magazine articles were published. Recycling groups were formed. Seminars dedicated to recycling were held to hear all these claims of "ours is the best, latest, and greatest."

Raw material specifications were set with limits on contaminants and prohibitive material. Studies were carried out regarding raw material supply from the "urban forest" forecasting prices, quality, and availability.

Agreements were made between paper companies, equipment vendors, chemical vendors, and engineering and construction firms. Contingency plans were drawn up. Facilities were finally being built.

Like with so many other things, the honeymoon had come to an end. Here are just a few examples of why:

The U.S. Postal Service decided that a peel-and-stick stamp was the answer to everyone who wanted to save time and saliva. What did it matter if the glue and the paper it was attached to was not recyclable?

The price of office wastepaper skyrocketed as much as 1,000%, while the quality dropped just as precipitously.

Every conceivable "non-paper" contaminant could be found in wastepaper-from food waste to medical waste, telephones to garbage. The market was hot, so why bother to sort the stuff? All of these new facilities needed wastepaper to run, so it was easy to sell it "as is."

Individual states cut back on recycling programs and budgets, wanting them to be self-sufficient. Some states did not plan to issue any more bonds to pay for recycling programs or projects. But promises were made, and facilities were built.

Now, the bottom has fallen out of the recycled fiber market. The White House backed off on the Executive Order that called for 50% recycled content. The average consumer really doesn't care if paper contains any recycled fiber or not. Several companies have gone into Chapter 11. The price of recycled pulp (and paper) has fallen. Most facilities have taken downtime or may operate only 3 to 4 days/week. Recycling may no longer be profitable-another downturn in an industry famous for overcapacity cycles.

EQUIPMENT CLAIMS AND REALITIES. Each piece of equipment in a deinking system is a percentage device. It typically removes something. Each has its own removal efficiency of ink, stickies, contaminants, or sometimes water. An individual piece of equipment or module with a removal efficiency of approximately 90% or greater is very good. But if a piece of equipment has a removal efficiency of 20% to 30%, it may not be worth the horsepower to use the device in the overall system.

Occasionally, a brochure is published with numerous charts and graphs filled with pseudo-scientific jargon claiming near 100% efficiency from a new piece of equipment. Typically this data is generated from a pilot plant facility. But demonstrating this technology on a commercial scale is quite another matter, since it may not scale up with the same high removal efficiencies.

Equipment advertisements claim "up to 98% efficiency," but in reality this equipment may only remove half of the contaminants sent to it. Other claims of processing 100% mixed office waste have turned out to be a furnish of highly sorted office waste, costing double that of mixed office waste.

Hard lessons were learned in association with many deinking projects. The end result was that the experience gained has provided the industry an insight as to the design of future deinking systems. Technology has advanced well beyond what the industry knew when the recycling "craze" began. The knowledge gained, costly as it was, provides the opportunity to move several steps closer to processing 100% mixed office waste.

Four years ago, the buzz word in office wastepaper deinking was laser printed paper. This was an obstacle to be overcome. Now, many deinking systems are able to process 100% laser printed paper. Some are able to process ultraviolet printed material. Ink removal is extremely good in the newest systems. Table 1 shows some of the best emerging technologies that could help improve recycling and deinking efficiency.

The current challenge appears to be stickies removal-specifically, pressure-sensitive adhesives (polyacrylates). The U.S. Postal Service changed its glue formulation in 1994 to a pressure-sensitive adhesive for the U.S. postage stamp. The labels used now for "change of address" are pressure sensitive. More than half of the 50 billion stamps sold this year will be of the pressure-sensitive, peel-and-stick type.

DISPERSIBLE VS SCREENABLE ADHESIVES. An important goal of deinking and wastepaper recycling mills is to remove all stickies entirely from the system either through screening and cleaning or by dispersion. What the industry has learned is that there is a possibility that dispersed adhesives will reagglomerate and accumulate in the water loops and create problems. Therefore, the filtering of recycled process water becomes necessary.

The days of 100% repulpable and water dispersible adhesives is long gone. Recycling mills with less advanced cleaning and screening equipment will certainly have to install more sophisticated equipment, especially as time goes by and closing of water loops becomes a requirement.

There are many factors that upset the ability to remove adhesives from a process, including:

Temperature changes

pH changes

Types of surfactants used, as well as biocides and other chemicals

Concentrations of electrolytes

Electro-kinetic relationships (zeta potential)

Mechanical forces such as pulping, kneading, dispersion, etc.

Trends toward tighter water loops increase the system water temperature and cause buildup of organic and inorganic contaminants in the form of suspended and/or dissolved solids.

The specific gravity of polyacrylate type stickies is very near 1.0. As these stickies travel through a deinking system, they pick up small ink particles that attach themselves around the sticky, making the particle heavy. Consequently, these stickies are not removed very well by centrifuge-type reverse cleaners. The stickies deform to a flat shape to work their way through slotted screen baskets. Small diameter forward cleaners appear to be somewhat effective at removing these little balls of stickies.

The stickies show up in the end product not only as a sticky but also as TAPPI dirt, since the particles are now dark in color. Some of the most common problems experienced by papermakers due to stickies are the following:

Buildup on wires, felts, and doctor blades

Reduced quality because of holes and dark spots in the sheet

Breaks and downtime.

WASTEPAPER MARKET ISSUES. The bottom line is that the technology to process 100% post-consumer mixed office wastepaper and economically produce high-quality deinked pulp is still being developed. Theoretically, a mill can process 100% mixed office wastepaper with a system that contains three or four separate stages of screens, cleaners, flotation cells, bleaching, etc. But the yield can be expected to be about 50%. For now, wastepaper must be highly sorted. Manual labor must be used to remove a vast array of contaminants in the wastepaper in order to economically produce deinked pulp.

As wastepaper recovery rates increase, the quality of sorted office paper will decline. Currently, office grades are being prepicked to remove high-value white papers, such as computer printout (CPO). But wastepaper collectors seem unwilling to absorb higher labor cost to manually remove contaminants.

Bale to bale variation is currently very high, and the composition of recovered wastepaper continues to change. Stickies, unbleached fiber, and other contaminates have increased dramatically. Thus, the sale of wastepaper boils down to one factor-price, not quality.

PROBLEMS WITH PULP TESTING. Testing the quality of deinked market pulp is another area where there is much room for improvement and industrywide standardization, specifically in determining dirt and sticky levels of deinked pulp. Dirt and stickies are the two biggest contaminants that plague quality.

Traditionally, dirt has been measured using the TAPPI test method TM-213. This method is a manual determination and counting method that is both time-consuming and subjective. Image analysis has sped up the dirt testing procedure, but is still subjective in establishing the sensitivity of the image analyzers.

The problem with using scanners is determining the threshold that will give accurate and reproducible results. Flatbed scanners utilize a 0 (black) to 256 (white) gray scale in measuring the dirt. The threshold value on this scale is what sets the parameter for a speck to be counted as dirt or not. At the present time there are many methods being used in setting this threshold value, but there is not an accepted industry standard.

One major problem with not having an industry standard is that testing facilities can get any dirt results they desire by adjusting the threshold value. Another obvious problem is not having comparable results between facilities. A 10 ppm dirt result at one deinking plant could be the same as a 20 ppm dirt result at another.

Even though it is difficult to compare results from different samples from different deinking plants on different scanners, a standardized test method will help put the deinking plant testing labs on the same basis.

Dirt is not the only test method that is in need of standardization. The sticky test is another area where an industry standard needs to be employed. Various deinking facilities use different testing methods for measuring the level of sticky contamination. Some use flat screens in preparing a sample that is either manually counted or scanned on image analyzers to measure the amount of stickies in a sample. Some use a 0.006-in. slotted screen, while others use 0.004-in. slotted screens. Standardization is needed both in how the samples are prepared and how they are counted and reported.

There have been many improvements in testing in the last four to five years. What is needed now is to use this technology and establish standards and testing methods that will provide accurate and reproducible results in a timely manner.

CONCLUSIONS. Nobody said it was going to be easy. And it certainly has not been. Four years is not a lot of time if one can stand back, take a breath, and review where we are and what has transpired.

Currently, it seems like the environmental movement in the U.S. is in one of its periodic retreats. This is important to remember because it is the environmental movement, at the bottom, that provides the fundamental driving force for deinking office wastepaper to produce high-quality pulp for the manufacture of printing and writing grades. Historically these grades have had relatively low amounts of recycled fiber in comparison with newsprint, tissue, and paperboard grades.

Also, at this time the North American pulp and paper industry is once again just coming out of yet another of its well-known downturns. With relatively low demand, low prices, low operating rates, and little evidence of market demand (or price incentive) for printing and writing grades with recycled fiber content, few papermakers have any appetite for using deinked pulp in any volume.

However, there is a strong possibility that both the market and environmental consciousness will change, and strong demand for deinked office wastepaper will once again surface. With the experience gained, those facilities constructed and started in the past few years will be in a good position to take advantage of the situation. In the meantime, the industry has learned several lessons, including:

The law of supply and demand still determines the price of wastepaper.

The law of supply and demand greatly influences wastepaper quality. Writing wastepaper specifications helps, but does not guarantee incoming wastepaper quality.

The law of supply and demand still sets the price of deinked pulp as well as consumer awareness.

Demand leads and drives deinking technology. A good example is slotted screens. A few years ago, an 0.008-in. slotted screen was considered the best. Today, it is down to 0.004-in., and 0.003-in. slot widths are being discussed.

New contaminants have entered the office wastepaper stream. For example, there is growing evidence that stickies can be caused by dispersible adhesives or screenable adhesives. The industry knows how to handle the screenable ones-e.g., hot melts-but the dispersible ones seem to reagglomerate after the deinking process.

It is reasonable to assume that contaminants unknown at this time will enter the wastepaper stream in the near future-e.g., ink jet color printed paper or new adhesives.

Deinking laser printed paper has been successfully proven.

Testing methods need to be standardized.

Deinking chemistry is important and so is sophisticated mechanical equipment. Success can not be achieved with just one or the other.

The current situation with office wastepaper deinking is only a short-term setback. Growth in the economy will eventually increase demand for paper products. Environmental constraints will limit the use of virgin pulp, and recycled pulp and paper will once again be the trend.

Low prices, internal problems thwart market deinked pulp industry recovery

It's no secret that plunging pulp prices sealed the fate of highly leveraged new market deinked pulp (MDIP) mills. The new generation of air-dried mills, planned and built when prices were strong and demand potential seemed strong, couldn't have started up at a worse time. The virgin pulp market, with which MDIP fortunes are linked, went from an unprecedented rebound in 1994 to an unprecedented tailspin in late 1995 from which it is still recovering. Adding to MDIP pulp price woes were equipment problems at most of the new mills.

Only one air-dried MDIP mill in the U.S., the 520 tpd Great Lakes Pulp & Fibre in Menominee, Mich., July 1996 startup, is fully operational. But it has been in default and in November filed a prenegotiated bankruptcy as part of a financial restructuring and recapitalization plan. Other financially distressed mills have at least temporarily been idled. Low prices are also afflicting various wet-lap MDIP mills and limiting their production, though they are not highly leveraged. Industry watchers are concerned that the restart of the idled mills will flood the market with pulp, further eroding prices.

Prices for 100% postconsumer printing-and-writing grade MDIP in second-quarter 1995 were in the $890-$955/ton f.o.b. range. But in the first three quarters of 1997, most prices had sunk to the $370-$425/short ton range, with reports of dumping at even lower prices (there was also limited pricing around $470-$480 or higher). In late summer, MDIP producers-the ones still operating, that is-managed to add on a few dollars to their prices, bringing most prices to the $390-$455/ton range. But producers have a long way to go before they are comfortable, and they probably will not realize increases this year because the virgin market has softened due to continued oversupply. Some MDIP producers compete in quality with southern bleached hardwood kraft (SBHK), which has been priced at about $510-$530/metric ton delivered ($562-$584/short ton) before discounts since July.

MDIP producers have also lost expected sales because of the federal government's failure to enforce a 1993 Executive Order requiring certain federal agencies to use 20% postconsumer pulp by Dec. 31, 1994 (the percentage increases to 30% by year-end 1998); industry and other protests have led to promises to comply. Another promising development is that as long as there is significant demand, paper manufacturers that streamline their product offerings are likely to opt for making paper with recycled content rather than nonrecycled.

Up and down. The most recently started greenfield mill to fall short of expectations is the air-dried 415 tpd Ponderosa Fibres of Pennsylvania Partnership, in Northampton, Pa. It started up in late 1996 and is still struggling with equipment problems that led to the company's July takeover of the mill from EPC contractor Parsons Main Inc. and related litigation. So far, it has produced only limited quantities of printing-and-writing grade pulp. Only one air-dried greenfield mill of the new startups was still under construction as other new mills began folding: the 265 tpd Ponderosa Fibres of Washington L.P., in Wallula, Wash., which began starting up in October 1997. It, too, faces equipment modifications-some of them similar to the Northampton mill's-before it will be fully operational, perhaps by mid-year 1998. Both mills are expected to undergo financial restructuring.

Meanwhile, the three air-dried mills that shut down just months after startup now face various fates. The first mill, idled in September 1996 amid disputes with turnkey contractor Beloit Corp., was the 440 tpd Massachusetts Recycling Assn. Corp. mill in Fitchburg, Mass., which had started up in January 1996. Following a bankruptcy filing in August 1997, in November 1997 its assets were sold-subject to existing liability-to the newly formed Massachusetts Paper Co. Inc. Beloit will operate the facility when it eventually restarts-perhaps as a tissue mill, with some MDIP as well.

The second mill idled was the 522 tpd American Fiber Resources in Fairmont, W. Va., following litigation with Ahlstrom Machinery Holdings Inc. The mill, which started up in September 1995 and shut down in November 1996, is going through bankruptcy and has been taken over by Beltech Recycling L.P., an affiliate of Balaclava Enterprises Ltd., the parent of Newstech Recycling L.P. in Coquitlam, B.C. Following equipment modifications, it could restart in first-quarter 1998. American Power Corp., the general partner in the construction of the mill, has since canceled its long-delayed MDIP project in South Amboy, N.J.

The third idled mill, First Urban Fiber Operations Inc. in Hagerstown, Md., has been shut since April and was put into receivership following an August takeover by bondholders who turned down a restructuring proposal. There was also an arbitration proceeding between Hagerstown Fiber and SBCCS Constructors, which built the mill. The mill, which started up in March 1996, faces some $8 million in modifications, including reconfiguration of its wastewater system and additional deinking equipment. Decisions about its future have yet to be made, and a restart time is uncertain.

Yet another new mill, the wet-lap 200 tpd Auburn Fiber in Auburn, Maine, which started up in October 1995, operates on a limited basis due to lack of orders. Its ownership was transferred in lieu of foreclosure in September 1996 to Atmor Holdings Inc., an affiliate of AT&T Commercial Finance Corp.

New capacity, ongoing plans. Through debottlenecking and process improvements, Burrows Paper Corp.'s wet-lap MDIP mill in Little Falls, N.Y., has increased its capacity this year from 100 tpd to 132 tpd and its wastepaper consumption has increased from 105 tpd to 190 tpd. Mississippi River Corp. (MRC) in Natchez, Miss., said it expects a capacity of 400 tpd by year-end 1997. The wet-lap mill has been adding capacity since mid-1996-growing from 280-300 tpd to its present 360 tpd-with startup of a state-of-the-art bleach plant and secondary deinking loop.

While numerous projects have bit the dust due to market conditions and overcapacity, two other proposals are still kicking-though not yet financed: Fox River Fiber Co. still wants to double the size of its 220 tpd MDIP mill in DePere, Wis., and Neches Fiber Limited Liability Corp. is still planning to build a 440 tpd MDIP mill in Beaumont, Texas.