For the past five months, Brady Corp. has been sending its industrial waste to be recycled into renewable fuel pellets.
The Milwaukee company, which manufactures high-performance labels, signs, safety devices and printing systems, cannot recycle its adhesive coated waste product in the traditional way.
“We have several different types of materials that are wound together or laminated,” said Craig Boers, manufacturing team leader. “Ninety percent of our waste has some type of adhesive or coating applied to it, which makes it harder for the general recycler to take.”
That’s where Greenwood Energy comes in. The Green Bay company has recently started collecting industrial waste from Milwaukee manufacturers such as Brady to recycle into its fuel pellets.
Greenwood was started in August 2009 and located in Wisconsin to target paper and label manufacturing companies, said general manager Ted Hansen.
The company works closely with waste haulers such as Waste Management Inc. and Veolia Environmental Services to identify and obtain waste from manufacturers that produce non-recyclable papers, labels and flexible packaging.
“In most cases (waste haulers) like working with us because they can go to their customer and they can offer a more sustainable solution than the landfill,” Hansen said.
Manufacturers such as Brady also like working with Greenwood because it is often cheaper to have waste sent to the company than to the landfill.
“In some cases, it saves the waste generator half the cost of landfill, in other cases it’s neutral, in other cases it will cost them some,” Hansen said. “The majority of people are saving money.”
Brady provides adhesive coated paper and polyester-type materials in 60-inch by 20-inch rolls, Boers said.
“The division I work at, we make a lot of barcode labels that go into the printing systems that Brady develops,” he said. “These rolls would be the waste generated from starting up the machine.”
Before working with Greenwood, Brady sent its scrap rolls to a different recycler in Ohio – which became too costly.
Boers expects the company will create about 250 tons of this waste material in 2012. It costs Brady about $2,400 per month to put the waste in a landfill. Greenwood transports and processes it for about $500 per month, he said.
Greenwood recently partnered with Recycling Solutions LLC in Milwaukee to create a transfer station where manufacturers can drop off their waste to be sent to Greenwood. Recycling Solutions was started in January 2011 by Enrico Siewert, who is also CEO of Action Recycling LLC in Milwaukee.
Greenwood and Recycling Solutions have several synergies that should lead to a successful relationship, Siewert said.
Recycling Solutions focuses on diverting paper mill waste from landfills by using a process that recycles some materials and turns others into refuse derived fuel.
“Our byproduct of our process is actually this fuel source that Greenwood is making their pellets out of,” he said.
In addition, serving as a transfer station for Greenwood makes it more cost-effective for Milwaukee area manufacturers to provide their waste to the pellet-maker instead of sending it to the landfill.
“You cannot typically separate those types of plastics and things that they’re using away from each other to make a product again,” Siewert said. “We’re collecting that waste as an alternative to putting it in the landfill.”
With a transfer station, companies can haul their compactors to Recycling Solutions, 2969 S. Chase Ave. in Milwaukee, and dump the loose material to be loaded into semi-trailer trucks for transport to Green Bay.
“Most industrial generators of waste have compactors at their facilities,” Hansen said. “It’s not economical to haul a compactor more than 20 or 30 miles.”
Greenwood takes in 10 loads per day of about 20 tons each, with plans to double that intake, Hansen said.
“We’re just getting started. It will probably take us two more years to get up to 400 tons per day,” he said.
Once the loose materials arrive at Greenwood, the company shreds it and mixes it to get the necessary energy content, then runs the mix through a pelleting process. There’s very little waste from the process – mostly metal contaminants or pieces of PVC or vinyl, Hansen said.
Greenwood worked with the renewable energy team at Godfrey & Kahn in Milwaukee to get Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approval of the pellets as a recycled, renewable fuel product.
They had to work to enact a change in existing state law, which took about a year, said Art Harrington, head of the renewable energy team at the law firm.
Now, Greenwood is able to market its pellets to coal-burning facilities as an alternative, renewable fuel source.
“It allows us to produce a cost-effective coal replacement that burns cleaner than coal and allows people to burn what’s considered by the State of Wisconsin to be a renewable fuel,” Hansen said.
The company is one of only about three or four in the country making the pellets out of industrial waste, and Greenwood plans to expand soon, he said.
“We are actively working to site additional plants throughout the Midwest,” Hansen said.
Greenwood currently sources waste from throughout Wisconsin. While it’s working with just five or six Milwaukee manufacturers at the moment, Hansen hopes to grow to 60 suppliers in the area.
