Safe travels: JMK Fibers upgrades its plant to handle the export market's demand for recovered paper grades.

0n the surface, one bale of OCC looks pretty much the same as another. But to assume that all bales are alike or that their differences are largely unimportant is to miss a golden opportunity. This kind of thinking and hard-nosed analysis may have spawned the old adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover."

King Kelso, the president of JMK Fibers, and Doug Swan, who manages the day-to-day operations in the company's plants, have considerable experience in terms of overseeing recycling operations. Carroll Kirk of Kirk Sales International, an equipment dealer based in Portland, Ore., has been advising clients on baling and balers for more than 26 years.

Recently, the three pooled their experience to upgrade the JMK materials recovery facility (MRF) in Tacoma, Wash., to maximize JMK's return on the recyclables it collects and processes.

HOT TIMES. Without question, the export markets for old corrugated containers (OCC) and other paper grades--as well as plastics--to China have been hot for some time.

As noted by paper industry consultants Bill Moore and Peter Engel in a recent feature for Recycling Today, (See "Looking East," starting on p. 62 in the Nov. 2005 issue or visit www. RecyclingToday.com to view the story online.), "The dominant player in the growing export market for the United States is China. Nearly half--48 percent--of exported U.S. OCC goes to China."

The authors also note that, "China is now the largest importer of U.S. recovered paper, exceeding the United States' North American neighbors Mexico and Canada. More than 40 percent of Chinas total recycled paper imports come from the United States, a fact that has been driving the U.S. market for several years."

Certainly, JMK's location on the Pacific Coast positions it well to tap into this market. But, as in any business, the company has had to make the right decisions to maximize its profitability, particularly when it comes to the tricky area of how to maximize the amount of material it loads into any given export container.

Any given ocean-going container ship will only take on so many containers, so the question at JMK hasn't ever been how to load more containers. Rather the question has been how to load each container with more product.

According to Kelso, buying and installing a new ultra-high-density baler was the most logical way to pursue the company's goal to maximize container shipments. Therefore, he worked with Kirk at Kirk Sales and Balemaster Inc., Crown Point, Ind., to install a new Balemaster model in August of 2005.

THE JMK WAY. The JMK Fibers MRF is located in Tacoma within a mile of the city's Pacific Ocean shipping docks. All of the residential curbside, small business and commercial recyclables that the City of Tacoma collects make their way to the tipping floor of the large JMK MRF.

An automated sorting system at JMK separates the cans and bottles from the scrap paper. In addition to the mixed paper and old newspapers (ONP) collected by the city trucks, JMK also accepts railcar lots and truck lots, roll stock from local mills and cardboard scrap collected from area businesses.

About 25 percent of all the material that comes into JMK Fibers needs to be sorted, says General Manager Swan. However, 100 percent of the material from curbside sources requires sorting, he adds. While the curbside material does not include glass, plastic and metal containers and paper do come in commingled and require separation.

To sort its material, JMK employs a system made by CP Manufacturing Inc. of National City, Calif. The commingled material is first loaded from the tipping floor onto a pre-sort infeed conveyor where sorters pick out the OCC, cereal boxes and garbage. Swan says JMK employs about 16 people to help sort the paper and containers at various picking stations along the way.

The material then enters a V-Screen, where the remaining paper, referred to at JMK as "curbside news," is separated from the plastic and metal containers. The containers go on to the infeed of the container conveyor line, and the paper moves on to a post-sort conveyor where brown paper or any containers that may have slipped through the V-Screen are removed.

On the container line, steel cans are pulled using a magnet, and aluminum cans are separated out with an eddy current separator.

The aluminum and tin cans are not baled, says Swan, but are hauled away to a local processor in 40-yard drop boxes. HDPE and PET have their own dedicated balers, and the new Balemaster model multi-tasks by baling plastic film and injection-grade plastic as well as OCC.

The MRF bales natural and colored HDPE, PET and injection-grade molded plastic for domestic consumption and export, taking advantage of the hungry Chinese market, Swan says. "The majority of plastics are going to China--they're like this huge void that needs to be filled," he says.

Close to 70 percent of the material that passes through JMK is collected regionally from Washington State and the neighboring Canadian province of British Columbia. More than 6,500 tons of bulk grades per month are processed at the single facility, which employs 42 people.

Trucks, railcars and containers are unloaded and bales of separated materials are made, inventoried and shipped six days per week throughout the year.

Most of the secondary fiber collected now goes overseas, Kelso says, and the appetite for clean fiber in China and India remains strong. This market dynamic puts the pressure on JMK to collect more, bale faster and do so while keeping operating costs in line.

Part of that solution has involved bigger bales (43 inches tall by 58 inches wide) that fit snugly into a standard export container and achieve considerable density. Bales of OCC that weigh in at 3,700 to 4,000 pounds (bigger and twice as heavy as some conventional bales) are being achieved with JMK's new equipment.

BIG-TIME BALING. JMK Fibers was eventually confronted with the problem of having more incoming material than its baler could keep up with. Kelso says it was wasn't so much that it was a bad baler as that it simply wasn't built to keep up with his idea of an optimized recycling operation.

When shopping for a new baler, Kelso says he wished to avoid units that were overpriced or undersized.

Kelso and Swan were impressed with the new 6200 "Fat Boy" model from Balemaster and its quality, reliability and ease of use.

Both the machine itself and the installation process have met Swan's standards for upgrading the Tacoma operation. "This heifer was unloaded in the morning and was making bales by suppertime," he remarks. "I came in the next morning, pushed the start button, set the bale length and let it go. It's been that way since the brute was installed in July of 2005. The only thing my guys need to do is keep up."

Swan comments, "We put thousands of tons ofOCC through here every month and have been processing at that rate for quite a while." The plant now runs a single shift and processes twice as much OCC, Swan says.

He adds, "Now I can put my people to work in parts of the plant where they can really be productive. They're not clearing jams in the feed chute and they're not waiting for the baler to produce the next bale."

The new baler is also helping JMK achieve bale weights more than twice as heavy as the bales it formerly produced. Where JMK formerly loaded one container with 28 bales, now the production team loads two containers with 30 bales. The lift trucks are carrying twice as much per shift, yet they're using less fuel than they used to and experiencing less wear and tear, according to Swan. The facility has cut its hours of operation by half and JMK enjoys twice the margin per shift than it did prior to installating the new baler.

Kelso says, "The machine we replaced was a good machine, and we're rebuilding it for use in another part of the plant, but I needed more production and lower costs on the OCC side."

Swan praises the labor-saving aspects of the higher-production baler at the Tacoma MRF. "We're all about optimizing production here, and this machine helped to take us to a different level."

For JMK Fibers, calculating that higher-production equipment would soon provide a return on investment was a sound formula.

PORTLAND JOINS REMIX PROGRAM

The city of Portland, Ore., has joined the ReMix (Recycling Magazines is Excellent) national recycling campaign, a public-private partnership created to increase the curbside recycling of magazines and catalogs. ReMix is a project of Time Inc., International Paper and the National Recycling Coalition.

"The ReMix campaign is a natural fit with city of Portland goals to reduce waste and to increase citywide recycling rates." Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman says. Diverting more magazines and catalogs from landfills will provide significant environmental and economic benefits to our community."

The ReMix campaign uses full-page public service announcements in a variety of magazines (Time. Parenting and Sports Illustrated among them) as well as various local communication and outreach messages The partners monitor results by working with local recycling facilities to regularly sort and count magazines and catalogs coming in through participating curbside programs.

Launched in Boston and Prince George County, Md., the ReMix effort helped to increase magazine and catalog recycling by 17 percent. respectively, in these communities The campaign has expanded to include the Milwaukee metro area as well

This article was submitted on behalf of Balemaster Inc., Crown Point, Ind.