Looking beyond recycling

Sustana Fiber has recycling in its DNA, but the mission of the De Pere, Wisconsin-based company focuses on the bigger picture: keeping the sustainability of its operations at the forefront as it pushes toward a circular economy.

The company operates three facilities, including a paper mill in Quebec and two fiber mills in De Pere and in Lévis, Quebec. Sustana makes 100 percent-recycled fiber at its De Pere facility and paper that contains up to 100 percent-recycled content in Quebec.

Blackstone Tactical Opportunities of New York purchased Sustana in December 2021 from Miami-based investment group H.I.G. Capital. At the time of the acquisition, Blackstone Managing Director Andrea Serra said, “The increasing focus on environmental sustainability by businesses and consumers alike is one of Blackstone’s highest-conviction investment themes—and we are proud to back Sustana.”

“The focus is all on recycled fiber,” says Renee Yardley, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Sustana.

Sustana processes nearly 2.2 million pounds of recycled material every day and approximately 750 million pounds per year. Its De Pere facility has a production capacity of 170,000 air-dried short tons per year, sourced primarily from the Midwest, while its Lévis facility has a production capacity of 110,000 air-dried short tons per year that are sourced from eastern Canada.

When it comes to growth, Yardley says Sustana is limited by its size. “Those are smaller facilities in the fiber world,” she explains.

But its size hasn’t limited its innovation. With strategic partnerships and a willingness to look beyond traditional feedstock, Sustana continues to push circularity forward in the pulp, paper and packaging industries.

Partners in innovation

Over the years, the industry has seen a shift from printing and writing paper to a greater focus on packaging. While that trend had been developing long before the coronavirus pandemic upended the market, that shift has only accelerated.

Sustana sourced much of its material from commercial and office buildings and schools— “everything that was closed during the pandemic,” Yardley says. In keeping with its passion for innovation, the company had to get creative to make up for the limited sorted office paper (SOP) supply.

Sustana, however, was ahead of the curve when it comes to fiber container recycling, more specifically, single-use paper cup recycling.

In 2018, Sustana partnered with Seattle-based Starbucks, Atlanta-based packaging producer WestRock and international packaging company Seda, with North American headquarters in Wisconsin, on its Cup to Cup: Closing the Loop initiative—a project aimed at demonstrating the viability of recycling and processing single-use paper cups to produce fiber to make new cups.

Sustana estimates that 60 billion single-use paper coffee cups are landfilled in the United States every year, citing inconsistent collection systems to capture paper cups and insufficient resources at material recovery facilities to recover the cups.

The company invested in equipment to recycle the Starbucks cups at scale by separating the interior polyethylene (PE) plastic liners. According to Sustana, the partnership successfully has recycled more than 25 million Starbucks cups into new cups.

“The ultimate vision of the Starbucks-Sustana partnership is to provide a full, closed-loop, zero-waste solution,” Sustana CEO Fabian de Armas said in a presentation on the partnership.

Containers became an increased part of Sustana’s recovered fiber mix during the pandemic because supply was limited from commercial buildings. The company backed the continued use of nontraditional fiber with the installation of a high-capacity shredder at its Lévis site, the first multilayer carton operation in Quebec.

The shredder, financially supported by Recyc-Quebec, improves the fiber recycling process for aseptic and gable-top containers, such as milk and juice cartons. It increased the site’s carton recycling capacity from 1,000 tons per year to 5,000 tons per year.

“It’s great fiber,” Yardley says of this material, “but you’ve got to shred it down so it can work through your process.”

That capital addition was completed in 2021, and Yardley says Sustana continues to consume that fiber in keeping with its focus on innovation.

Sustana also has teamed up with Sonoco and Kellogg’s to determine the recyclability of rigid paper containers with steel bottoms, like those manufactured for Kellogg’s food brands. Sonoco already had determined these containers could be recycled in the steel stream, but wanted to increase recyclability within the paper stream and take advantage of an underused fiber source. That’s when Sustana joined the trial, along with Colorado-based equipment and technology provider Amp Robotics.

“People would say, ‘You can’t do that,’” Yardley says of rigid paper container recycling. “We showed them that it can be recycled.

“The circular value chain is challenging, and the biggest challenge around it is logistics—getting all the products back to recycle them,” she adds. “It’s not an easy task to do that, so partnerships are key.”

Circular focus

Sustana’s EnviroLife, a 100 percent-recycled, sustainable fiber, received a letter of no objection from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015, confirming it’s compliant with FDA standards for food-grade packaging. Yardley says Sustana’s focus over the next several years will be in the food-grade packaging space, working with brand owners to improve the circularity of their products.

“There’s a lot of paper products that are used with direct food contact, so I think the food packaging industry is ripe for recycling because a lot of it doesn’t get recycled, and it doesn’t include recycled content,” she says.

Yardley says the brand owners she’s worked with are aware of the evolving benchmarks of including recycled content in packaging for consumer products and that those companies want to make sure they are hitting those thresholds. As recycling becomes more of a priority to consumers, as well, Sustana continues to work with those brand owners to increase the recyclability of packaging.

“People are concerned about climate change, and what it seems consumers want to do is recycle, and so as the demand is there for increased recycling, the large brand owners want to look at how they can contribute to that,” Yardley says.

But the key to advancing any number of Sustana partnerships is education. It’s hard to drum up consumer support if most don’t understand the processes in place and the goals they’re working toward. “There are all sorts of things we have to look at,” she says. “We need to educate the consumers as we’re going forward, and we’re all going to have to be involved, from the brand owner to the recycler.

“We’re not going to be able to do everything all at once,” she adds. “I think it’s important that we have more partnerships out there like Sonoco, like Starbucks, where we can demonstrate that this can be done and that we can do it at a certain level, then take it to the next level. [The average consumer doesn’t] understand all the logistics and all the steps that go into that process, so it’s definitely going to be the key to us moving forward and how we’re working.”

Sustana is planning what Yardley calls “a large investment” at its De Pere facility to further its commitment to the circular economy. She says the investment will allow the facility to produce dry fiber that can be shipped to regions such as the West Coast or overseas, “allowing more companies the ability to put recycled content into their products.”

In the meantime, Sustana continues to look beyond recycling and is committed to ensuring the sustainability of its operations at all facilities, minimizing water and power use and waste. Yardley says the company always is looking for smarter ways to reduce its environmental impact.

“It’s our DNA,” Yardley says. “It’s beyond recycling; it’s sustainability.”

Sustana hired Jeff Crawford last February to serve as vice president of sustainability. His role is to ensure sustainability is embedded within the company’s entire manufacturing process and to advance its leadership in providing sustainable recycled-content solutions to the paper and packaging industry.

“I think there’s a lot of brands out there that have the same mindset that we do in that we want to make the best use of the resources,” Yardley says. “I think there’s more room for recycled paper out there. … We’re a small mill in the fiber and paper industry, so we’re going to continue to find those like-minded consumers. And I think I see it growing over the next year because, in terms of this circular economy, an easy way for brands to work on their emissions is to use recycled paper.”

This story previously appeared on www.RecyclingToday.com. The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at mmcnees@gie.net.