Naturally Green

Canada has at times been divided by its dual-language heritage, but the origins of Cascades Recovery lie in the similar paths taken by two families—one in French-speaking Quebec and the other in English-speaking Ontario.

One decade after the Lemaire family began building a paper recycling and manufacturing business in Quebec in the 1960s, the Metauro brothers began building their own paper recycling business in Ontario.

In the subsequent decades, both companies grew and forged an alliance. The result today is multi-national paper company Cascades Inc. (the company founded by the Lemaire family), which includes Cascades Recovery Inc. (the company founded by the Metauro brothers) as one of its fastest-growing business units.
 

Decades of Achievement
On its corporate website (www.cascades.com), Cascades refers to Antonio, Bernard, Laurent and Alain Lemaire as "pioneers of recycling" who ultimately embarked on "a great adventure."

The Lemaire family began managing the Drummond Pulp & Fibre company, which collected household and industrial scrap, in 1957.

Just seven years later, in 1964, Antonio and his sons ventured into the production of paper made from recycled fiber when the family took over a distressed mill in Kingsey Falls, Québec. The name Papier Cascades Inc. was born with that transaction.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Lemaires managed Cascades for growth, adding additional mills to the company's portfolio and commissioning new paper machines at many of these sites.

During this same time, brothers Al and Anthony Metauro began collecting discarded cardboard and other paper in Toronto with a pickup truck, using their family's garage for storage and sorting of the material.

Just as the Lemaires did, the Metauros worked hard, took risks when appropriate and invested in their business, which was soon operating under the name Metro Waste Paper.

As Metro Waste grew to earn considerable market share in Toronto (Canada's largest market), it gained the attention of Cascades as one of its key recovered fiber suppliers.

In 1995, Cascades bought a stake in Metro Waste Paper, starting a partnership that has grown and evolved in the ensuing 16 years. According to Al Metauro, the Cascades investment in Metro Waste Paper helped the company purchase capital equipment and expand into new geographic markets with a confidence it may not have had otherwise.

In October of 2010, the Metro Waste Paper Recovery Inc. name was retired in favor of Cascades Recovery Inc. The name change unifies the Cascades brand through the company's collection to processing to recycled-content manufacturing loop. It also reflects the current ownership status of Cascades Recovery: 73 percent by Cascades Inc. and 27 percent by Metauro Group Holdings Inc.
 

A Green Loop
Either a conversation with Al or a visit to the Cascades website can help to convey the prominent role that Cascades Recovery plays in the overall Cascades Inc. strategy.

On the website, the company's "Green by Nature" slogan features a tag line beneath it that reads, "Recovery + Packaging + Paper." Also displayed prominently is a link to the company's 2010-2012 Sustainable Development Plan.

The website's Products and Services drop-down menu features "Recovery" as the top item, with a write-up that indicates, "Through our recovery systems, discarded materials are collected and processed for use in new products. Together, we are responsible manufacturers of paper and packaging, we produce it, and after it has been used, we want it back."

According to Al Metauro, Cascades Recovery now handles some 1.56 million tons of recyclable materials annually, processing this material at 23 facilities, 18 of which are in Canada, while the United States is home to five.

"Our specialty is paper and paper packaging, representing 90 percent of the volume handled by our operations," Metauro says. "The balance is made up of plastic, metals and glass."

The company's roots and its long-standing relationship with Cascades' paper mills have factored into its emphasis on the recovery of discarded paper. "Because of our relationship with Cascades Inc., procuring secondary fiber from the IC&I (industrial, commercial and institutional) sectors became our main focus," Metauro says.

When demand from overseas for secondary fiber began increasing, says Metauro, "Cascades realized the importance of securing a steady supply from the generators in these sectors."

Several factors, most of them customer-driven, have given Cascades Recovery the opportunity to handle materials beyond paper. "Our transition right now is to manage all discarded materials," Metauro says. "It is driven by the generators, and large retailers in particular are driving this concept. Unlike five or six years ago, they are genuinely looking to find ways to divert their material from the landfill."

Metauro continues, "Retailers often are going back to the producer of what they're discarding to ask them to find a recycling method. We're seeing that trend grow."

Cascades Recovery markets its ability to handle all discarded materials to customers in part through its Recovery …PLUSTM program, which creates a discarded material management plan "that is customized and specifically developed for each customer," according to the Cascades website.

The Recovery...PLUS program often starts with tours of customers' facilities, followed by a waste and recycling audit and the development of the Recovery …PLUS plan to maximize recycling opportunities.

In the case of plastics, some retailers also are distinguishing between recycling and other forms of landfill diversion, he says. "They have a belief in this molecule-to-molecule concept," Metauro says. "Their attitude is not 'making energy is OK.' They want to see molecule-to-molecule—not necessarily bottle-to-bottle, for example, but at least bottle-to-product."

Cascades Recovery's involvement in the processing of tonnage collected through residential recycling programs also has brought it into contact with a wider array of materials. "If we look at what material has increased [through that stream], it is non-fiber materials, particularly plastics," Metauro says.

Among the options available to Cascades Recovery for discarded plastic is sending material to its Plastiques Cascades – Re-Plast facility in Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil, Québec. Like Cascades Recovery, Re-Plast is a part of the Cascades Specialty Products Group.

At the plant, recovered plastic is used as feedstock in the production of decking boards and outdoor furniture (such as park benches, picnic tables and flower pots) made from 100 percent post-industrial and post-consumer plastic scrap.
 

A World of Issues
Decades of sound strategy and building strong relationships with customers have helped put Cascades Recovery in the paper and packaging recycling industry's upper echelon.

Metauro and the other leaders of the company, however, are quick to point out that there is no room to breathe easy, as market conditions and the economic landscape can change so rapidly.

"Right now, markets for many of the materials are much more stable than they have been in the past," Metauro says. "The demand for these materials is good to strong, and with the global market appetite, prices are holding at a level that is encouraging even greater recovery of these materials."

As an industry veteran, however, Metauro has seen these circumstances change in the past and says the company needs to stay prepared for them to change again soon. The globalization of the recycling industry has brought challenges and opportunities, he notes.

"With global trade playing a larger role in consuming the materials collected, supply and demand can take longer to balance than what the end markets can tolerate," Metauro cautions. "Add to this the decline in generation of some grades, and some end markets may not be able to survive working with new, tighter than expected margins. [Some buyers] in North America may not be able to compete for materials if the economic conditions are stronger abroad, and buyers in those markets are able to pay more as a result."

On the opportunities side, global trade opens the door for secondary materials to be used by a larger base of consumers, Metauro says. This flexibility allows for combinations of material to be collected, expanding the recovery of certain materials that would be cost-prohibitive to collect otherwise.

Metauro continues, "The global market gives us opportunity—it keeps us healthy. The way I look at it, if our market region is generating 10 or 12 million tons of recovered fiber, that same marketplace is only going to consume 40 to 60 percent of that. The reality is that there are more materials available than can be consumed in North America. That's a fact."

The era of challenges and opportunities keeps Cascades Recovery's leadership team active and engaged in the market, Metauro says. "Like any business, you have to be creative," he comments. "As soon as you feel the competition matching your creativity, it's time to come up with something better and even more creative. The success behind this creativity relies on understanding what generators are facing in regard to managing discarded materials and what their needs are."

Under its new brand name, Metauro says Cascades Recovery will "support our sustainability goals as well as those of our customers. Continued growth in recovery infrastructure is the major focus for the next five years. Cascades and Cascades Recovery will capitalize on what we have believed in and built over the last 45 years: being a Green by Nature company and focusing on managing discarded materials by promoting our Recovery …PLUS program."

The author is editorial director of Recycling Today and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.