NPR Recycling

NPR Recycling has been servicing our customers for over 60 years. Our site is located in Romulus, just north of Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Our three production plants, 2 warehouses and our maintenance garage sit on over 22 acres.

Our promise is to provide the safest, quickest, and most cost effective service to our customers while maintaining steady outlets for any waste material generated at their respective sites. Our network of mills, brokers, packers, and landfills will be scrutinized to ensure they also operate at their peak to provide the best possible price for our suppliers material.

Every day you throw out about 4 pounds of trash. So does everybody else in America!

In a year that’s 180 million tons – enough to fill a line of garbage trucks halfway to the moon.

It takes a lot of trees and energy to make paper. In fact, people in the United States cut down 850 million trees to make paper products each year. When trees are cut down, they are turned into wood chips. The wood chips are mixed with chemicals and water to make pulp. The pulp is spread out on a moving screen to make a thin layer of fibers. When the layer of fibers dries, it becomes paper.

Old paper can be turned back into pulp and made into new recycled paper, using less energy than it takes to produce new paper from raw material. Recycling paper saves trees and forests, which make oxygen and help keep the air clean. Saving forests protects the homes of many animals, too.

By recycling you are also helping to save your natural resources. Every ton of paper that is recycled saves 17 trees from being cut down for new paper.

Some paper manufactures in the United States began recycling paper in the early 1900’s. But even today, only about a fifth of the paper used in the United States is recycled.

Other countries recycle a much larger percentage of their paper. Almost half of Japan’s paper is recycled. West Germany recycles almost a third of its paper, and Austria and the Netherlands recycle more than a third. Such countries as Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, which have large forests of trees suitable for making paper, usually recycle
much smaller amounts.

Our plant at NPR Recycling take some steps in preparing paper for recycling before sending the paper to the paper mills. All waste paper is not of the same grade; so all types of paper cannot be mixed together for recycling. Cardboard and newspapers, for example, cannot be used to make high quality printing paper, but they can be used to make more cardboard and newspaper.

We sort the scrap paper products according to their quality and what they can be used to produce. Corrugated boxes and cardboard can be used to make new boxes, board, and wallboard. Old newsprint can be recycled for new newsprint, egg cartons, corrugated boxes, and wallboard. Mixed waste paper from offices, such as typing paper, notepaper, and mixed envelopes can be recycled to make shoeboxes, cardboard tablet backs, and tarpaper used in roofing. Glossy magazines, ledgers, index cards, and business machine papers can be recycled to high quality printing paper, paper cups and paper plates, food cartons, paper towels, and facial tissues.

After the paper has been sorted, we bale the different grades of paper and send it to the paper mills. Each bale may weigh as much as a ton.

We collect a lot of our high grade paper from large printing shops which they collect all there scrap paper in large (Gaylord) boxes, or bale it. We pick it up and also pay our customers for their material. One of our Printing shops receives around $20,000.00 a month. That equals out to be one trailer load a day. Average weight approx. 40,000 pounds in a trailer load.

When we send it to the paper mills, they put each bale on a conveyor belt and break open each bale, an inspector checks the opened bales to be sure nothing was packed in them by mistake. Sometimes the inspector must remove such things as broom handles, rags, bottles or metal tools. These materials could shut down the mill or ruin the new paper.

The conveyor belt then moves the old paper to a huge machine, called a hydrapulper. Hot water in the hydrapulper cooks the paper until it forms a thick soup of wastepaper fibers. During this operation, detergent and chemicals, such as caustic soda, begin to remove old inks from the millions of tiny wood fibers that make up paper.

By this time, the old paper has become paper pulp that looks something like cottage cheese. It moves from hydrapulper to special spinners. As the spinners whirl the pulp around, pins, staples, and other materials that might have been attached to the paper spin out of the mixture. From the spinners, the pulp goes to a series of moving screens that take out other impurities. A series of washers finish cleaning the pulp by removing ink, dirt, clay, and any starches or chemicals from the original paper.

After washing and screening, the pulp is clean, but must be bleached with chlorine so that all the fibers become the same whiteness. Then the chlorine bleach must be washed out of the pulp, just as washing machines must wash bleach out of your white clothes before they can be worn again. Then a vacuum cleaner sucks out some of the water to make the pulp thicker, and a final shower removes that last bits of dirt or other impurities left in the pulp.

Now the pulp is ready to be made into paper. Some paper mills make paper entirely from recycled fibers. Others may use half recycled fibers and half new fibers. The recycled pulp then moves to beating and mixing machines. If new fiber is to be added, it is first broken up in another hydrapulper. Then the mixing machine carefully blends the new and recycled fibers. After more beating operations, the pulp is pumped to the papermaking machines.

Papermaking machine slowly feeds the pulp onto a wire mesh that will begin forming the pulp in to sheets. A series of rollers keeps the 14-foot-wide mesh moving forward at a high rate of speed. As the pulp is fed onto the mesh, the mesh shakes from side to side. This pushes the paper fibers together and shakes some of the water out of the pulp. When the pulp begins its journey along the wire it is 99 percent water, and only 1 percent fiber. Gradually the water drains through the wire. The papermaking machine may be as long as a football field.

Then the wire mesh feeds the paper sheet into rollers that press together to squeeze out more water. Other machines suck out even more water before the paper sheet moves to dryer rollers.

The dryer rollers are heated and steam out the last drops of water. As the paper moves through the drying machine, clay and starches are applies to both sides of it. The clay and starches give the paper a smooth, hard surface for printing and writing.

Finally, the paper moves through more heated rollers that iron it smooth. The finished paper comes off the machine in three-ton rolls. The rolls are cut to whatever size the customer wishes and are wrapped and shipped to a printer or publisher.

Recycling other grades of paper is different. For example pulp for cardboard does not need to be bleached, because it makes no difference whether the fibers are all the same color.

Recycled paper can be recycled over and over again. Not only to recycle paper to paper. Some people have used shredded waste paper to grow mushrooms.

At present, many communities have no recycling centers; many people do not know about recycling; and many more never take part in the recycling projects going on in their communities. Meanwhile, the trash and garbage heaps around the world continue to grow, whole forests of trees continue to be cut down for paper; more valuable minerals are taken from the earth, and insufficient methods of waste disposal continue to pollute our beautiful planet.

Recycling our waste materials cannot solve all of these problems, but it can help. And the most important person in the whole process is YOU.