Midwest Fiber Recycling purchases Community Resource

Midwest Fiber Recycling, headquartered in Decatur, Illinois, has announced the acquisition of Community Resource Inc. (CRI), Urbana, Illinois. The merger offers the Champaign-Urbana area additional recycling services and gives businesses the opportunity to reduce the amount of material being sent to the landfill. The transaction closed July 17, 2017.

Todd Shumaker, director of sales and procurement for Midwest Fiber Recycling, says, “We are excited about our acquisition of Community Resource Inc. We will be changing the name to Midwest Fiber Recycling of Urbana, to fall in line with the branding of our other five recycling facilities in Illinois and Indiana.”

Shumaker adds that Midwest Fiber Recycling will invest in improvements to the former CRI facility designed to improve efficiency and to give the location the ability to process a higher volume and a wider variety of material. “Along with the services already being offered by the site, this facility will become a depot for transferring single-stream collected material back to our material recovery facility (MRF) in Normal, Illinois,” he says.

The companies’ combined capabilities also will lead to near- and long-term growth opportunities, creating more “green jobs,” a news release issued by Midwest Fiber Recycling states.

“We will be looking to grow supply with new customer acquisition and within the base of customers we already service by offering creative recycling solutions, which may include plastic recycling, gaylord and box reuse programs, composting, alternative landfill options for hard-to-recycle materials and a total managed approach to waste and recycling,” Shumaker says. “Each of these suppliers will also have access to our real-time recycling metrics via our custom designed customer web portal.”

CRI and its President Matt Snyder have been providing recycling services to commercial and industrial businesses since 1996. CRI uses a combination of company-owned hauling equipment and contracted carriers across the United States to ship approximately 1,500 truckloads of recyclables annually.

Snyder will stay on in an advisory role with the company for a short time following the acquisition but plans to fully retire eventually to travel with his wife, Shumaker says.

Midwest Fiber Recycling has served central Illinois since 1990 and currently operates facilities in the Illinois cities of Bloomington-Normal, Decatur, Springfield and Peoria and in Terre Haute, Indiana. The company says it has more than 375,000 square feet of processing and warehousing facilities and keeps more than 300 million pounds of recyclables per year.

In addition to providing recycling services, Midwest Fiber also operates a confidential document destruction division and a food composting program.