A new recycling facility was debuted by Georgia-Pacific
After two years in development, the first commercial implementation of a new recycling technology debuted in Lincoln County last month. The paper manufacturing company hopes to ramp up to full production at the new facility within the next year.
The copyrighted Juno technology was developed by Georgia-Pacific to extract useable paper fibers from mixed solid waste feedstock that contains food, paper, plastic and metal. The extracted fibers are later turned into containerboard, while other materials are sorted and sent to the appropriate offsite recycling facilities or an offsite industrial landfill.
The way the Juno process works is that raw material is fed into a rotating autoclave, which is a steam-pressurized vessel with an internal rotating drum that processes and breaks down the raw materials. The system also sanitizes the feedstock while it separates paper fiber from the other materials.
Fiber recovered from the Juno facility will be sent as a slurry to Georgia-Pacific’s nearby old corrugated container plant inside the containerboard mill and will be further cleaned and refined along with the regular old corrugated container feedstock, supplementing the material that is already processed in the old corrugated container plant, generally made up of fibers extracted from wood chips and old corrugated containers.
Small-scale testing at the facility began last month and will gradually ramp up in the coming months and is planned to reach full production by the end of the year. The facility began staffing 10 full-time employees last month and will be working with Dahl Disposal for material handling and delivery, creating another three full-time jobs.
Raw materials sourced from across the region will be collected, baled and wrapped at an off-site solid waste collection facility, in this case, mainly the Dahl transfer station in Toledo. The sealed, plastic wrapped bales will be delivered, unloaded and stored outside of the new processing building before becoming feedstock for the Juno facility. Any effluent arising from the process will be treated in the mill’s existing wastewater treatment system.
Juno will not receive or accept any hazardous wastes, asbestos-containing materials or otherwise inappropriate solid waste streams and the feedstock for the Juno facility will come from commercial sources.
Juno will help recycle material that couldn’t previously be recycled, and up to 90 percent of the material it will process would have otherwise ended up in landfills or incinerators. This kind of commercial waste typically couldn’t be recycled because of food contamination and plastic coatings – the company said in a release published in April 21.
“Juno positions Toledo and Lincoln County at the forefront of sustainability innovation,” said Juno facility Manager Franz Cosenza. “We are grateful to the community for supporting this transformative initiative.”
