The right place at the right time

What started as a summer job at a recycled paper mill has turned into a decadeslong career for Ron Sasine.

Sasine, currently principal at Hudson Windsor, a boutique packaging consultancy he founded in Bentonville, Arkansas, has had stints at the former MeadWestvaco, which merged with RockTenn to form WestRock in 2015, as well as senior director of packaging for Walmart—the largest retail company in the world.

“I was very fortunate to be able to segue into a consulting role where I now guide consumer products companies and packaging manufacturers as they deal with the challenges of modern retailing, both in brick and mortar, e-commerce and other modes of social engagement and social commerce that are taking over,” he tells Recycling Today.

“That has been a great opportunity to take what was ... 30 years of packaging and recycling and sustainability and supply chain [experience] and roll it into something that could be put forward as a service for companies that need help, and that’s what I’m working on now.”

Along with helping companies achieve sustainability goals, Sasine and his brother, John, CEO of Crossroads Paper, revealed earlier this year that a recycled containerboard mill they originally planned to build in Utah is now back on track and being sited in Winnemucca, Nevada.

The $450 million project includes a mill that can process around 370,000 tons of recovered paper, and the brothers expect the facility to start up by the end of 2026.

In the following interview, Ron Sasine discusses the evolution of paper recycling and the role recycling plays in the packaging industry and also provides details on the planned Crossroads Paper recycled containerboard mill project.

Recycling Today (RT): How did you find your way into the packaging industry?

Ron Sasine (RS): During graduate school, I was given the opportunity to work a summer co-op in a recycled paper mill. We had, attached to that mill, a very large corrugated box facility, so I was able to see the corrugated box business from bales of OCC [old corrugated containers] all the way through to finished, printed packaging on a truck ready to go out the door.

I’d been around the edges of packaging for a while, but this was a real soup-to-nuts experience of, “Give me a bale of OCC [and] I’ll give you a box.” It was an experience that really opened my eyes to what manufacturing could mean for me as a career and the critical role it played in the supply chain.

I then was hired by that same employer, one of the predecessor companies to what is now known as Smurfit Westrock. I joined Westvaco Corp. right out of grad school and spent almost 19 years there with WestRock, then transitioned away from WestRock and into the retail business, where I took on a role as senior director of packaging at Walmart. ... I had a lot of experience at that point with containerboard, corrugated packaging, paperboard, plastic film and plastic molding, but deepened all of those in Walmart because we worked with every packaged good you could imagine. It just meant that we went from dealing in a subsegment of packaging to everything you could possibly imagine.

The great thing about working in that role was every day was a buffet of interesting packaging challenges. It might be breakfast cereal, followed by skin care, followed by diapers, followed by packaged produce all in one day, and the next morning it would reset and it would be over-the-counter medications, vitamins, frozen pizza—just this nonstop flow of interesting packaging challenges and interesting packaging implications in terms of what are the materials that are being chosen [and] how do they get used? What happens in the recycling space and how do you how do you deal with it?

RT: How did your outlook on recycling change the more you worked with packaging and retail companies?

RS: I will often talk to folks about the role of packaging in society, because it has a very significant role in how we provide the necessities of life to the folks who are located where they’re located and extracting them from the places where they’re produced or grown. So, you’ve got to get it from where it is to where it’s going to get used, and that has so many societal impacts. … That’s really fundamentally important for us.

Packaging will continue to grow, and it will continue to grow at rates faster than population expansion and it is because of the role it plays in serving not just the fully developed economies but the growing economic output around the world. So, we’re going to have packaging with us for a long, long time, and it’s important we recognize why we’re going to have it and that it’s a good thing. [Fundamentally], packaged goods are a marker of successful growing economies that feed their populations, care for their populations’ health needs, satisfy their populations’ aspirations—all those things are packaging related, if not driven.

For me, we don’t need to have the conversation about how we are going to reduce packaging; we have to have the conversation about what I’m going to do with it and how we’re going to manage it. The recycling portion is so important. When I walked into that first paper mill and began to understand how the value of the resource ... could be converted into something of equal benefit downstream, that was a major eye-opener.

RT: What have we learned about recyclable packaging as it has evolved? And can the recycling industry work in tandem with the packaging industry?

RS: When we began in the late 19th century to build the modern chemical pulping processes that are still used today, we began to see that we could get greater volume out of some of these virgin mills than we could get out of recycled mills because of the way chemical pulping functions. It just was a much more efficient way to put lots of material out into the market, especially in the postwar period. Recycling didn’t flourish in the way some of the virgin mills did, but starting in the [19]70s, ’80s, that’s when we really began to see we could use more recycled furnish in our paper businesses. And then we saw, over the last several years, significant investments and now announcements of new recycled capacity.

As those [virgin] mills were being drawn down and taken out of the market, we’re seeing an almost equivalent volume of new recycled capacity being introduced into the market. That’s not by coincidence, it’s because people are seeing there’s an added desire for higher recycled content across the board. So, … it’s not uncommon to see higher rates of recycled fiber being used, even in ostensibly virgin mill operations. ... The fact the material is there means we need to capture and use it.

RT: What gaps remain in terms of capturing that material?

RS: The largest hurdle is ensuring there’s better retention. We talk about capture, but really what it’s about is retaining that fiber where it’s landing in someone’s home today as opposed to at a retail establishment. ... It starts to get lost in the system, and we don’t have really effective ways to capture it as we have when it goes to a retail or industrial location. Ensuring we don’t lose that stuff through the net and into landfill is a huge opportunity.

EPR … has the potential to change the way recyclable materials are valued and priced and owned. When ownership and pricing of those recyclables begins to shift, there may be some unforeseen outcomes about availability and recovery, and we need to keep a very close eye on how that evolves. In any market, who owns what and how much they can sell it for is a massively important determinant of how that market functions, and if recyclers all of a sudden are owned by someone else and priced under different methodologies, we could see some negative externalities on availability of the materials.

“I want to be sure every time we take something out of the ground or take fiber from a forest that we give it every possibility to be used as many times as can be economically and physically viable." – Ron Sasine

RT: Is EPR legislation going to be a disruptor that leads to positive change in recycling—specifically paper?

RS: The recycling industry has survived other changes before, but the biggest challenge right now is the clouded pathway forward for the impact of EPR, the ability to capture ... material we’re not currently retaining and how we get that brought through the system in a more efficient manner. ... We’ve just got to understand that it’s not easy.

RT: What are packaging companies’ biggest concerns?

RS: Prepandemic, everybody was trying to solve their sustainability issues. Can we use [more] recycled material? What would those higher rates of recycled material look like? … There was a lot going on and much of it was focused on questions surrounding sustainability and the perception of more sustainable materials.

Over the last 18 months, the focus on cost has been much more dominant. The world of higher prices and inflation and materials costs and supply chain transparency and supply chain efficiency, near-shoring, all those issues have risen to the top, so folks are much more concerned about controlling raw materials costs. There are certain things we just need to be aware of, and that is there are price expectations in the consumer’s pocketbook that have to be met, so all these pieces became much more of a focus. Cost control, supply chain efficiency [and] getting the right supplier in the right location is a bigger story every day.

RT: You and your brother, John Sasine, are working on a recycled containerboard mill project in Nevada that originally was planned for Utah. Why the move, and how has the project evolved since it was announced in 2019?

RS: My brother and I have been in parallel lanes in our business history for a long time. John built and ran the largest private recycling company in the Intermountain West. … Now that’s an area that, coincidentally, includes the three fastest-growing states in the in the nation: Utah, Idaho and Nevada. It’s a growing contributor to manufacturing, but a significant contributor to agricultural production in very interesting and important subset categories.

So, John’s building this recycling entity focused on the Intermountain West, [and] I’m off making paper and boxes and working for a big retailer. If you were in the recycling business in the 2000s, 2010s, you started to notice the newspapers we used to recycle were slowly diminishing until they finally almost disappeared. You noticed the commercial print magazines, direct mail, computer manuals, all that stuff dwindled and dwindled and dwindled. But, at the same time, what you noticed was you had a lot more cardboard boxes than you ever used to have, so these two piles got smaller, while your third pile started to grow and grow and grow.

John and I began to recognize, in addition to having a lot of recycled materials and materials that were previously being sent primarily to China or to other parts of Asia, there’s a lot of demand for that here in North America. What’s interesting is paper mills have been traditionally sited in locations that were closer to major manufacturing centers or major agricultural centers. That’s why we have box plants and paper mills all over the upper Midwest and the Southeast, because that’s where we had fiber and it’s because it’s where we had grain and beef processing. Where paper mills have been less well-represented among manufacturing opportunities has been in the western United States, … and the few that do exist, primarily right along the West Coast, are of an older vintage and are significantly capacity-challenged.

Lots of people need boxes because everything we want to eat now comes from the West; it’s salad from Arizona, it’s fruit and nuts from California, it’s fruit from Washington state. All these growing parts of the American diet are located now in areas where paper supply has historically been low. All of a sudden, my brother has more OCC than he can find domestic buyers for, and I’ve got a lot of experience in the papermaking and box business. He says to me one day over a family dinner, “We should build a paper mill.” I said, “Yeah, pass the rolls, please.” I was not at all interested in building a paper mill.

A few months later, ... we came to an agreement that we’re going to take six months and we’re going to study this. We’re going to give it our undivided attention to figure out whether there’s an actual market that exists and how would we do it. We began a very serious review of what was going on in the market, what were the needs, who was doing what, where were the big players? What we identified was that a very big opening for a new recycled paper operation focused on the western part of the United States that could process locally available material in growing consumer markets and use it for local and domestic box makers. Let’s capture it. We’ll keep it in the system. We’ll use it here and we’ll put it back to beneficial use before sending it overseas and bringing paper back from somewhere else. That became the driving force.

We announced an intention to locate it in Utah, but after assessing utilities, availability, transportation, logistics, what really became clear to us was the best place to be was the far western edge of Nevada. … The possibility here is now for the users of recycled containerboard, users of recycled linerboard, medium, we would now be able to service them from a location that is two hours from the California state line as opposed to a four-day drive from South Carolina. These logistics opportunities really begin to drive the thinking, and the raw material, the OCC that currently would be collected in places like the broader Salt Lake City metropolitan area, Boise, [Idaho,] some of these cities that currently ship material to the coast and hope to find a container and get it somehow pushed off to Asia. That material now gets collected, moved down Interstate 80 and dropped into a domestic mill designed for domestic customers.

It’s a really nice combination of my brother’s history and mine, some local knowledge ... and then, quite fortunately, the opportunity to do something that none of the major players have focused on because their focus has been in some of the traditional areas and traditional markets. … We’re putting the right piece of new, modern machinery in the right place where the market is growing, and the demand is expanding at the right time.

RT: So, location is the biggest factor in the potential success of the project?

RS: It’s location, location, location [and] the opportunity to introduce very modern production equipment. You’ve seen over the years a number of mills that have attempted to repurpose older equipment designed originally for other paper grades, and they’ve had mixed success. Our effort is focused on its original assumption—getting the right machine, the right size, the right configuration, specifically for what we’re going to put across it.

RT: What kind of equipment are you installing and what company are you working with?

RS: Our paper machine will be coming from Valmet in Finland. I’ve had the chance to see their workshops and am very familiar with machinery they’ve installed. This has been a global effort. My papermaking experience goes back to locations around the world, but this effort, specifically, has included visiting operations outside North America. Not that we don’t appreciate the North American paper industry—we absolutely do, and we know great things have come from North American companies—but most of the important new developments in papermaking technology are happening outside the U.S. We’ve gone to those operations and really dove deep into what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and how that could be applied here.

RT: What kind of recycled feedstock will the mill consume?

RS: We’ll of course be using OCC. Depending on the grade we’ll manufacture, we’ll use a blended ratio of OCC to residential and mixed office paper. … We will use all those major grades and we’ll use box plant clippings and the like, but the core of it will be OCC. What’s really fascinating about this ... is that the paper machinery companies recognize the quality distinctions between American OCC and global OCC, and they are designing our equipment with the higher-quality OCC that we see in North America as really the foundational grade in the furnish. That’s wonderful because it allows the final product to compete very favorably with virgin or with other recycled grades.

RT: How do you view the state of the recycling industry, or the recycled packaging industry, and what do you hope to see going forward?

RS: The recycling industry has followed a very similar process to its major customers and its major suppliers, and that is the process of supplier consolidation. Consolidation in any industry, but particularly in this one, will result in greater control by a smaller number of companies. Ideally, it will result in greater efficiency and performance.

Recycling was, for many, many decades, a local endeavor. We’re going to gather up the old newspapers in our town, and the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are going to drop it off at the local paper mill and they’re going to make something useful out of it. … It was very much a domestic type of operation. It has, over the last four decades, become part of a global network increasingly managed by large industry-leading global players. I believe we have every expectation that process will continue and will deepen.

The challenge we face is the growing requirement to process additional materials and produce cleaner output than was the case in previous decades, and that additional processing and additional cleanliness requirements will bring higher capital outlay than the industry was built around. Capital costs are going to increase because we’re going to have to do more … with fewer people. We’re going to have to do more with different types of recycling than we have heretofore used. All those pieces are going to separate the truly capable, truly financially stable operations from those that are less stable financially and less well-equipped to invest in new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things. So, we’re going to have to do more, we’re going to have to do better and we’re going to have to keep up with demands that are both regulatory in nature and commercial in nature.

I’m consistently pointing out to folks that while we talk about the regulatory requirements that are coming, it may well be the compliance requirements from private actors that impact us more in the future. It’s going to be large consumer products companies saying, “I need X, Y and Z,” that will come faster at us than new EPA or Federal Trade Commission guidelines. They’re private actors; they can make decisions and move in a way government regulators ... would be potentially constrained.

Recycled content is important because it is material of value that still has beneficial use ahead of it. I often used to say in my Walmart days the worst thing we can do is dig something out of the ground or harvest it from a tree, use it once and stick it back in the ground. I want to be sure every time we take something out of the ground or take fiber from a forest that we give it every possibility to be used as many times as can be economically and physically viable, because those resources are precious and both they and we deserve to get every economically beneficial use out of them.

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at mmcnees@gie.net.