Turning recyclable trash into gold
Posted: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 3:49 PM by Victor Limjoco
By Michelle Kosinski, NBC News Correspondent
One after the other, trucks rumble into the dusty lot behind Cal Tigchelaar’s sprawling complex and dump mountains of garbage at his feet.
Ah, the sweet smell of success.
It smells pretty fierce actually, and we gag a little in the heat of the late suburban Chicago spring. All the while, watching in amazement the sheer volume of it all.
And it's not really garbage--definitely not in Cal's eyes. He's a little sensitive about that word.
"Recyclables," he corrects us, when one of us slips and calls his endless pile of odds and ends "trash.” To him, it amounts to a gold mine.
He started his company years ago as a garbage collection service and then, slowly, perceived a new market opening up before his eyes. Asia wants our trash: paper, plastic, metal. They want a lot of it. More than we can even supply.
And China, India, and surrounding countries are willing to pay unprecedented prices for it.
Cal changed his business model. Today, his is the largest sorting and shipping facility for recyclables in North America.
700 tons a day-- of our old newspapers, cookie boxes and water bottles-- go straight to China from his warehouse door. In giant bales, piled up to the ceiling.
In two weeks' time, these goods will arrive there to be reborn. Turned into the products that those booming economies now have enormous demand for-- as well as all that packaging for products that will be made overseas and shipped right back to our shores.
China, for example, just doesn't have the forests it would require to make all the paper it needs from scratch. And fuel prices these days make manufacturing items from virgin materials much more expensive anyway.
The cycle...of stuff.
It makes environmentalists happy, since they say a lot more pollution results when you mine, or forest, or refine virgin materials versus making them from someone else's scrap.
This sudden insatiable appetite for American landfill-cloggers has also been a boon to local economies. In Chicago, for example, instead of having to pay forty bucks a ton to dump these piles in a landfill-- they now make 70 per ton, by selling it to Cal. He sorts it, ships it, and everybody's happy. Except that China always wants more.
We had an important question though: isn't it incredibly wasteful to ship this material around the globe? Doesn't the fuel involved counterbalance any environmental benefit in the recycling itself?
Well, it may not be ideal-- too bad all this stuff can't yet be recycled at home-- but folks like Cal say an enormous number of those shipping containers that arrive in our country from Asia, filled with products made there, would ordinarily just be shipped back-- EMPTY. We don't have very many products to ship back.
But now, more and more, we have our scrap paper, crushed cans, and old milk cartons.
As a result, the cost of shipping it there is so low-- in containers that have to go back to China anyway-- that it costs Cal less to ship his scrap all the way over the ocean, than it does over land to, say, Atlanta.
Again, we are amazed.
And we need to get out of the way, because a long line of China shipping trucks are queued up behind us, waiting to carry the bales of sorted stuff away.
Some of it is worth four times what it was only five years ago.
Cal likes making more money these days, but says it makes him feel even better that he is saving landfill space and helping the planet.
As a Chicago streets and sanitation official told us proudly, "One man's trash is another man's gold."
