Paper and Steel: Site Tours to Papiro Sarda and West Recycling

A breeze rippling off of the salt pans west of Cagliari mixes the scent of the sea with the slightly sour smell that surrounds Papiro Sarda. It also tosses stray pieces of paper, as insignificant as grains of sand to the behemoth facility that squats in the center of the industrial park, across the on-ramp as we walk up it, the smell growing stronger. We enter through its maw - the receiving area, piles of paper rising to one side and stacked one-ton bales walling in the other - and approach the first stage of the recycling: the pulper. Here, water is mixed with paper down to a 5% solids concentration slurry in the equivalent of a large food processor.

 The receiving area at PapiroSarda. Credit: Danielle Stone.

The pulper misting paper with water and blending it into a slurry. Credit: Danielle Stone.

From there, a series of screens and density separators remove contaminants accumulated during the waste collection process. The use of a cyclone is interesting since it was operating under wet conditions, while I have previously only seem them used with air, but it makes sense that a tweaked design can work for a different fluid. The contaminants can be bits of metal, glass, and plastic, and the lining of TetraPak containers and their ilk. The use of the TetraPaks specifically is something that remains confusing to me: the paper industry doesn’t like recycling them and their use generates waste in the form of residues from the purification process, but the majority of (non-alcoholic) beverages sold at grocery stores here come in them. I wonder if there are any sorts of plans to reduce their use in coming years to mitigate these effects.

Contaminants removed from  the paper feed by the cyclone. Credit: Danielle Stone. 

Amidst the low rumble of machinery and the slow trickle of water, the slurry is diluted further to a 1% solids concentration in a series of tanks before being transferred to the most impressive of the machines here: the sheet former. The slurry streams on top of a fabric belt, becoming more concentrated by means of gravity and suction as it does, before being thrown further into the bowels of a sequence of towering, humming machines. Here, presses and dryers remove even more water, slowing increasing the solids concentration first to 20%, then 35%, on to 50%, and finally up to 96%. A yellow radiation warning sign guards a sensor that measures the paper quality determining its fitness. Then, the paper is unwound and rewound from a steel spool onto a cardboard one and lifted by mechanical hands to a loading floor below. It is breathtaking, the precision and consistency of these great steel beasts, producing roll after roll after roll, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It makes me value the paper more, seeing how much power and care is put into its creation.

 Paper being formed into sheets.

We next were able to see the inside of Papiro Sarda’s paper products factory, where they make paper bags and butcher paper for sale. The butcher  is very interesting in that the food-safe plastic film that lines one side is designed to be easily peeled off so the plastic and paper can be recycled separately. This is similar to how other packaging in Italy is designed, differently from how things are done in the U.S. It is a thoughtful change and one that would be nice to see implemented back home.

Me with one of the paper bags from PapiroSarda. Credit: Danielle Stone.

Just a couple of streets down, a lower, louder, more sprawling facility sits, receiving truckload after truckload of electronics and appliances for deconstruction and recycling. A line of workers manually process the initial loads, punctuating the afternoon stillness with the clanging of the metal and shearing of wire. The manual labor stands out compared to Papiro Sarda, where the workers were only monitoring machinery. It seems the more heterogeneous stream of waste here requires human intervention to be processed. It strikes me how often they bend and twist, and I wonder if they would work the same with a table in front of them to save their backs from the repetitive motions. As we continue through the plant, the technology is further digested into neat bins of steel, plastic, and non-ferrous metal scrap.

A worker at West Recycling sorting through dismantled waste. Credit: Danielle Stone.

I learn something new from examining a partially digested washer: the majority of their weight is a concrete cylinder around the drum, which helps stabilize the machine and serve as a store for rotational energy, like some sort of convoluted flywheel. Here, though, it is just something to be ground up and separated into bins full of concrete shards, the metal components shunted into adjacent containers. As in the paper plant, the level of industrialization here is eye-opening, revealing the energy and material that are required to give our discards new life. It fills me with hope: both Papiro Sarda and West discuss the new investments they are making to their plants and their planned expansions. If this can be done here, surely it has a future in the U.S., too.

A conveyor belt of dryer drums making their way into a crusher. Credit: Danielle Stone.