The Herald Turns Trash Into Cash

by Randy Woods

For daily newspapers, it’s a fact of life that their product is discarded a few hours after it’s printed. At The Miami Herald, however, a far-reaching recycling program has turned this inherent waste into a tidy profit.

In the last two years, the Miami Herald Publishing Co., which prints the Herald and the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, has stepped up its waste-minimization efforts to reach a 95 percent solid-waste recycling rate and is in the process of eliminating most of its liquid wastes. In 1999, the program generated a combined revenue return and savings of more than $1 million.

Alicia L. Beceña and Harry G. Phelps Jr. show off the tons of newsprint, mill wrapper and mixed paper they help the Herald collect for recycling.

"Whenever you hear about getting savings well into the six-figure range, you know you’ve got a great recycling program going," says Don Hensel, NAA environmental, health and safety services manager. "You don’t see too many papers out there with recycling programs as large or as comprehensive."

In 1999, the newspaper recycled approximately 17,900 tons of newsprint (both printed and white), mill wrapper and mixed paper, generating a revenue return of nearly $925,500, says Alicia L. Beceña, the paper’s environmental and safety engineer. Other major materials recycled in the program include 58.3 tons of aluminum plates and 6.7 tons of film negatives, worth a combined total of about $75,000.

Along with the conventional materials in its recycling program, the Herald has found ways to recover harder-to-recycle items, such as wood pallets, used oil and oil filters, fluorescent light bulbs, and plastic drums. In a filtering process that is still being tested with fixer and developer chemicals, the Herald was able to recover 850 pounds of silver in 1999, worth about $60,000.

"Recycling in this business has always made economic sense," says Beceña.

The Herald also received a $70,000 tax break for joining the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program. Sponsored by the Florida Department of Labor and Employment Security, the program determined that at least 75 percent of electric consumption was related to manufacturing. The Herald also garnered $56,000 in utility rebates last year after installing high-efficiency chiller units using a more efficient, less toxic refrigerant known as R-123.

In addition to the extensive recycling program, the Herald has instituted an aggressive waste-reduction program, with emphasis on hazardous chemicals used in the parts-cleaning process. This year, the Herald will replace its current solvent-based parts washers with a Hydro-Blast aqueous parts washer, which uses a biodegradable detergent and hot water mix. "It’s like a dishwasher," Beceña says. "We just put the parts in, turn it on, and one-and-a-half hours later, they’re clean."

More importantly, she says, the small amount of waste produced from the Hydro-Blast process will not be classified as hazardous because it doesn’t use solvents. The Herald currently spends about $15,000 per year to dispose of hazardous solvents. By next year, she says, the solvent disposal costs for the parts washer will be completely eliminated.

While the recycling program is going well today, getting employees to accept the program wasn’t always easy, Beceña says. "The biggest obstacle has been getting the employees to buy in," she says. "But since we got them to try the new products, we haven’t had too many problems."

Gradual implementation was the key to getting the pressroom staff to accept the program, Beceña says. "We have been slowly reducing the volatile organic compounds in the blanket wash, and the workers sometimes had to scrub just a little bit harder," she says. "Then we lowered [the VOCs] a bit more and have kept on gradually reducing it so no one would really notice. We never got a lot of grief from the pressroom, so I think it’s working out well."

Through the VOC phase-out program, the Herald reduced its consumption of hazardous blanket-wash solvents from 15,300 gallons in 1999 to just 1,500 gallons in 2000, a decrease of more than 90 percent. "After all the new pollution-control equipment is installed, we expect even bigger gains in 2001," Beceña says.  

Woods is a Seattle free-lancer. Email, doonser@seanet.com.