Baler Upgrades Keep Webcom
Environmentally Friendly

Webcom undertakes many initiatives to minimize waste - through ink recycling, silver recovery, chemical recovery - but one of the most obvious questions for visitors coming to our plant and book readers alike tends to be, "What happens to paper waste?" Here at Webcom not all the paper used in book production winds up in the finished book. Fact is, there’s quite a bit of paper left over ... in bits and pieces, of course.

To make sure that this paper waste doesn’t end up in landfills, we use baler machinery to collect and sort it. It’s then sent back to the mill where it’s recycled - converted into useful every days items like tissue paper, napkins, newspaper and packaging. At Webcom, we take the concept of reduce, reuse, recycle very seriously. In fact, it drives our search for environmentally friendly technologies!

Webcom actually recycles two types of paper waste - bindery trim waste and bin waste. Here’s how it works:

Bindery Trim: Once bindery equipment affixes the cover to the text pages of a book, the book is trimmed so its edges are perfectly even. Vacuum tubes catch this bindery trim as it’s sliced from each book and a powerful suction pulls it toward the baler. White offset paper is automatically separated (or destreamed) from the groundwood paper prior to entering the baler. Once in the baler, it will be compressed under 8,000 lbs. of pressure to produce two separate cube-shaped paper bales (also called broke), each weighing about 1,200 lbs. At the mills, the bales are combined with additional broke to be processed into white or off-white post-consumer paper products.

Due to the high consumer demand for white paper products, destreaming allows us more flexibility in the types of broke we can supply back to the mills. In fact we upgraded our baler technology so that we could provide destreaming right at our plant. We currently supply about 200 tons of broke to paper mills per month, 30% of which is groundwood paper and 70% white offset paper.

Bin Waste: Make-readies, running waste and roll wrappers comprise the bin waste created during web and sheet fed printing. These are sent to the mill in separate groups where they are formed into bales and stored until use in post-consumer paper manufacturing. We supply about 250 tons of bin waste to paper mills per month.

A book ... a newspaper ... a napkin. Paper that’s good to the last drop. At Webcom, we’re proud to take a pro-active part in the recycling process.