Baler Focus: Point of Purchase

Printing plants, large industrial facilities and office buildings may attract the most attention when it comes to procuring commercial scrap paper, but retail stores are not being left behind.

Recyclers have long known that a large percentage of cardboard boxes that produce the old corrugated container (OCC) grade are opened and disposed of at retail stores.

The owners and managers of these retail chains are also well aware that the empty boxes they generate are a desired secondary commodity.

Because of the efforts of recovered fiber dealers looking for material, store owners looking for a return on their OCC and baler manufactures seeking to place machines at generation points, the retail recycling infrastructure has grown.

Retail locations may generate their share of office paper, but the commodity most commonly associated with grocery, discount and departments stores is OCC.

"We’ve all seen the store personnel stocking the shelves, breaking down the boxes and loading them into a cart or onto a hand pallet to take them to the back room where the baler is," says Joe Szany of Marathon Equipment Co., Vernon, Ala.

Marathon, like many baler companies, has made an effort to offer balers that are ideal for operating in the back room or storage areas of retail stores. As Szany notes, most often these are vertical balers with smaller footprint.

Because OCC is one of the most commonly collected and marketed grades, mills and recyclers have been working to capture the retail stream, even when the price paid for OCC may be slumping.

"Typically, the retail store has a contract with a hauler, paper packer or broker to come by and collect their bales," notes Jim Jagou, a vice president with Harris Waste Management Inc., Peachtree City, Ga.

Jagou says it is increasingly common for recycling companies to send out a flat-bed truck, often with a forklift in tow, to make the rounds of retail locations under contract in a region to pick up bales weekly. "Those bales are then taken back to a central point, consolidated into larger loads and sent to mills," he remarks.

OCC is not handled identically by any means, however. Larger retail sites may have a larger baler, and others may have a compactor on the premises. Smaller stores may only need to manually break down boxes for later collection.

A compactor can retain a lot of material, but does not offer finished processing, notes Szany. "With a compactor, the load is not mill ready. It’s not dense enough to transport over a long distance," he remarks. "The company that installed the compactor might empty it and bring the material back to its facility and then bale it."

As noted earlier, vertical balers probably have the most widespread presence at retail locations.

"Larger retail generators might use a machine known as a 60/30 HD vertical baler," says Szany, adding that the HD stands for heavy duty and the numbers for bale dimensions that are 60-inches long and 30-inches deep. ("The third dimension is variable, but usually from 40- to 48-inches wide," he adds.)

Jagou concurs that people collecting OCC from retailers "generally prefer a mill-sized bale, 60-inches long that weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds."

A recent Marathon entry in the vertical baling segment is the Stockroom Baler. Szany says it is a small vertical model that does not require any heavy lifting or the use of any lifting equipment. "The baler tips completed bales onto platforms with wheels that come with the baler. These can then be easily moved with a hand cart."

In addition to OCC, many retailers are using their balers to compress the growing amounts of plastic film they see coming through the loading dock. "If you’ve ever seen palletized loads coming in, they stretch wrap most of them. All this film is now in retail back rooms, and it’s becoming a major handling issue."

Jagou notes that many recyclers have agreed to handle the baled film, even though the market is not as established as for OCC.

Both recyclers and baler manufacturers remain interested in the selling or distribution points one step removed from retailing. Ken Korney, director of worldwide sales for International Baler Co., Jacksonville, Fla., notes that distribution centers that handle merchandize before it hits retailers and return centers that handle it afterward are also major generators of the OCC grade.

"At a standard distribution center for a department or discount store, products might come in larger boxes that are emptied out, and the boxes go on a conveyor line to a baler where the OCC is recycled," says Korney. Typically, this baler is a larger, horizontal model.

The volume and pace of generation is quicker than at a retail store, Korney notes. He adds that International Baler recently installed nine horizontal balers at the distribution centers of one national retailer.

In addition to the distribution center, most retailers now also operate "return" centers, where returned or unsold merchandise is often backhauled by the same trucks who bring new merchandise to stores.

According to Korney, at these facilities, "the merchandise gets unboxed and scanned and paperwork is done on it before the product goes back to a manufacturer. But the boxes are emptied and placed onto a conveyor, just like at the incoming distribution centers."

Korney says these centers, often run by sub-contractors to the retailers, have become more common in recent years.

As much as it ever has, retailing is a national industry, with large retail chains now dominating in the department, discount and pharmacy areas. Grocery chains are still largely regional, but usually reach a size of several dozen locations.

Such large companies are increasingly aware of the dollars to be saved (or made) by recycling components of their waste streams rather than disposing of them. "Recycling programs are usually established on the headquarters level for national retailers," says Szany. "Usually they have at least one person whose business it is to know that for "x" number of dollars of merchandise, there is going to be "x" number of tons and dollars of corrugated generated."

Adds Szany, "There is someone in any large chain retailer who is probably very astute in terms of pricing and in setting policies to react to that pricing." He notes reading that an executive from one Carolinas-based grocery chain boasted of fetching $7 million in revenues from the store’s recycling program in one recent year.

"When corrugated is $100 per ton, you can have a lot of balers being purchased because the revenues can justify that," he notes. "But when market prices are low, you might have people charging to remove loads," he continues, making the recycling programs less of an emphasis with many retailers.

The retail chains may purchase their balers and make recycling arrangements nationally or regionally within the chain. "A company that tries to do everything out of its headquarters might work directly with a paper mill company," says Szany. "That mill company will then handle the logistics, often working through its own plants or with regional recyclers."