By VIVIENNE JANNATPOUR
Colorado Daily Staff
January 19, 2004
As of February 1, the Colorado Daily you hold in your hands will be completely different, but look exactly the same.
The Colorado Daily will complete its transition to 100% post-consumer newsprint by the end of this month.
"It's a little more expensive and we've had to make some changes to our presses, but we feel it's worth it," said Randy Miller, president, publisher and editor of the Daily.
This shift to 100% post-consumer fibers will save 9,550 trees, 5.5 million gallons of water, 48,000 pounds of air pollutants and 3.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year, according to calculations by the CU Recycling Center.
In addition, the new recycling plan means that the same paper you put in the recycling bin today may end up back in your hands in a few months. The Colorado Daily is purchasing its paper from the same mill that receives materials from the CU Recycling Center.
Jack DeBell, Director of Recycling Services, is excited about the change. "You'll be closing the loop by using CU's old fiber at your paper, which we will later collect again. We congratulate the Daily for closing the loop. This is a fine example of the best practice in recycling nationwide," he said.
The CU recycling center collects 375 tons of newspaper per year from 750 central recycling bins and 10,000 desk-side containers across campus. The recycling program saves the university $235,000 per year of landfill service costs because recycling the materials is actually less expensive. The program earns an additional $53,000 per year by selling the paper to Ecocycle.
Ecocycle bundles the papers into 1200 to 1600 pound bales and sells them to a paper company in Denver. This paper company sells its surplus paper to the Snowflake Mill in Arizona, who supplies the paper to the Colorado Daily.
The Snowflake mill, owned by Abitibi Consolidated, produces only post-consumer pulp from old newsprint and magazines acquired through recycling programs throughout the western United States. Post-consumer content refers specifically to materials from products that were used by consumers or businesses and would otherwise be discarded as waste.
Arthur "Skip" Hellerud, environmental/technical manager for the Snowflake Mill said environmental concerns and business matters led the company to switch to 100 percent recycled materials.
"Timber sales in nearby forests were decreasing so much that sawmills were closing down and getting pulpwood from other states was too expensive to be practical," he said. "Coupled with tightening environmental regulations, we decided 100 percent recycled was the most viable option to keep the mill operating."
The company invested $24 million in 1998 to convert the site's machinery to use only recycled materials. The new machines are designed to handle the challenges of processing inked newsprint.
"We have sophisticated apparatus that tell us how many spots a sheet has, and can take important micro-measurements of the humidity and opacity of a sheet," said Mike Flynn, buyer for the mill.
The mill now uses fewer and safer chemicals than they did to make paper from wood chips. This improves the working environment. "And, as you can imagine," Flynn said, "environmental relations are also much better."
The 13 million gallons of water used each day to produce and wash the pulp are also recycled, moving on to an unexpected new life.
The water is reused until it becomes too dirty for papermaking, and is stored in two one-mile square ponds near the mill. The water is then irrigated to Abitibi's 3,100-acre farm, which yields about 85,000 tons of crops yearly. The crops are sold to local ranchers to feed their livestock.
"We're pretty proud of the farm here," said Hellerud, who added that Abitibi barely breaks even on the farm's operating costs. "It really isn't intended to be a money-making venture," he said.
In 2004, the Snowflake plant will reprocess enough used newsprint, magazines and cardboard to make 343,000 metric tons of newsprint and another 122,000 of "medium," a brown paper product used in cardboard boxes.
DeBell said that Abitibi's converted Snowflake mill and the Colorado Daily's switch to recycled paper is a sign that recycling is working. "We're on the path now to getting the maximum life out of the Colorado Daily, and that's a good thing. People still have to recycle, of course, but now we can get the most use of that fiber," he added.