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BizVoice/Indiana Chamber – July/August 2017
Revving Up Recycling’s ‘Economic Engine’
SALVAGING FOR
SECOND CHANCES
There’s no time to waste.
Recycle. Reuse. Reduce. Renew.
Now.
Recycling isn’t reserved for the
environmentally conscious. It also impacts the
economy.
According to a study commissioned by
the Indiana Recycling Coalition (IRC), over
92% of what gets thrown away in Indiana is
valuable recyclable and compostable material.
The same report –
The Untapped Job
Potential of Indiana’s Recycling Industry
,
conducted by the Bowen Center for Public
Affairs at Ball State University – reveals that a
25% increase in recycling could create
10,000 new jobs.
In addition, approximately 66% of
what’s landfilled or incinerated is not just
garbage, but a commodity that manufacturers
refer to as “recycled content feedstock.”
Examples include paper, plastic and metals.
First-term Indiana Rep. Carey Hamilton
(D-Indianapolis), who serves as the IRC’s
executive director, says education is essential.
“What we continue to work on is
making sure that communities know there’s a
lot of in-state demand for recycled
commodities,” she emphasizes. “In Indiana,
we still have a relatively low recycling rate. If
we can increase our recycling in Indiana, we
will directly support these manufacturers.
We’ll create new jobs all around the state to
get that material ready to send to them.”
High-tech paper mills, refineries and
more are poised to revitalize Indiana’s recycling
industry. All are powered by innovation.
Breaking ground, bringing jobs
Georgia-based Pratt Industries has a
culture that’s “steeped in sustainability,” says
Midwest region vice president and general
manager Paul England.
He adds that it has a dominant play in
the Indiana marketplace, with a 100%
recycled paper mill (one of four it operates
nationwide) and corrugated packaging plant
in Valparaiso and a recycling facility in Gary.
In 2016, Pratt opended the $270 million
Valparaiso paper mill.
“What we do is, me and my team go out
and secure 500,000 tons a year,” England
explains. “We give it to our paper mill in
Valparaiso and they make paper. That paper
goes in a tunnel across maybe 20 yards to the
largest corrugated box plant in the world.
They make boxes. They ship those boxes to
companies like Amazon, FedEx and Home
Depot and Kroger, and on and on.
“The very cool thing is that they deliver
those boxes. My team picks up all of their
recycling and brings it back, and we do it all
over again. It’s called closing the loop. And a
large portion of the fiber we consume at our
paper mill is from our customers,” he
continues. “When I talk to customers about
closing the loop and bringing back their
recyclables, it resonates with them like you
would not believe! It’s a big part of what we
do. It’s a big value proposition. And it’s great
for our customers.”
All about the bottles
Perpetual Recycling Solutions, located in
Richmond, creates clean PET (polyethylene
terephthalate) flakes from the plastic beverage
bottles and food containers discarded by
consumers.
Launched in 2012, it employs 73 at its
125,000-square-foot facility.
“We recycle about 120 million pounds of
material a year and I expect that to go up in the
future – not down,” observes chief executive
officer Peter Zurkow. “If I loosely work into
that (it equals around) three billion bottles.
“If you draw a line from eastern
Michigan to us and then to Huntsville,
Alabama, that makes us sort of the western
outpost. There’s not another facility doing
what we’re doing until California.”
Perpetual’s largest customers are
thermoformer sheet manufacturers.
“People that make the clear clam shells
that you buy your sandwich in at the
supermarket or you buy a fruit platter from
the grocery store,” he discloses. “Those are
our biggest customers. For us, the goal is
food-grade applications. That’s what we’re
set up to do. We’re set up to create a level of
decontamination that makes the product
reusable in the food-grade world.”
Pumped about plastic
Stephen Hogan, president and CEO of
GEP Fuel & Energy Indiana, is passionate
when describing the company’s $300 million
recycling project in Indiana.
There are two components: a recycling
center and an adjacent plastics-to-diesel refinery
near Camden. The undertaking will create up
to 256 high-wage jobs in Carroll County by 2020.
“We want to have a good, stable
workforce that can be with us long term
because we don’t want to constantly go
through the cost of retraining,” Hogan
By Symone C. Skrzycki
“If we can increase our recycling in
Indiana, we will directly support these
manufacturers (of recycled commodities).
We’ll create new jobs all around the
state to get that material ready to
send to them.”
Carey Hamilton
Energy and the Environment