Recycling has a Silver Lining

by P.J. Heller

A look into options that document destruction contractors and records storage facility owners have for safely disposing of film & media waste.

Get paid for helping the environment.

While that might sound like a recruiting ad for an environmental organization, it’s actually an offer being made to document storage and destruction companies to keep potential hazardous wastes and other materials out of the nation’s dwindling landfills.

“If you have something with value to it — and you’re going to get paid for it — why would you throw it away,” asks Larry DeWitt, president and chief executive officer of Commodity Resource & Environmental (CRE), Inc.

“If you can recycle something, why wouldn’t you recycle it,” adds Joel Peterson, Midwest sales manager for Gemark Corp.

“You’re doing something good for the environment by putting that product back into use.

“Plus,” he says, “we’ve paid the customer considerably for the material. There isn’t any better feeling that being able to give a customer $20,000 for something they would have paid $1,200 to landfill.”

“It’s a win-win-win situation,” Peterson insists. “Everybody’s happy. We’ve got more business. The customer, instead of having a negative $1,200 to $1,500 has a positive $20,000. And the right thing is being done with the material. It’s huge.”

“When you’re out there saying, ‘OK, we’re going to provide a service and we’re going to end up paying you, I mean what’s easier than that,’” DeWitt says.

Although DeWitt and Peterson are competitors in the precious metals refining and recovery business, they both have the same message for document storage and destruction companies, particularly those that handle silver-based film products such as medical X-ray films, microfiche, microfilm and graphic arts films.

Their mantra: Recycle. And the more the better.

“The beauty of our business is that we have the economic side as well as the environmental side,” says DeWitt, who in 1980 founded CRE, a precious metals refiner specializing exclusively in the recovery and recycling of silver by-products generated from photographic imaging facilities. “We’re being good citizens, the customers are being good citizens by recycling... They’re being good citizens and they’re being economically smart at the same time.”

Peterson echoes those sentiments and offers a dire warning to companies who treat environmental issues with disdain.

“We’re going to run out of land if we keep putting all this stuff in landfills,” he says. “We’re going to run out of good water. And we’re going to run out of resources and materials.

“If you can reuse it again, why wouldn’t you,” he asks.

Both CRE and Gemark offer document storage/destruction companies an environmentally friendly option to dispose of silver-based film products — while paying those companies for the silver that is recovered.

That amount can vary widely, depending on market prices. About six months ago, silver was fetching $18 an ounce; today the price is about half that. Such a precipitous market drop could mean that it might actually cost companies to recycle their silver-based films, prompting them to send the material straight to a landfill.

“One of my big pet peeves is companies are shredding and landfilling microfiche and microfilm just because it’s cheaper for them to do that, even though it’s wrong,” Peterson says, noting that cost for recycling such products depends on both the market price of silver and the actual silver content in the film.

Others may balk at recycling efforts, concerned they might have to spend time and effort sorting paper documents and film stored in the same folders. Such concern is unfounded, according to both DeWitt and Johnson.

By not recycling, companies are “putting that hazardous silver into the earth,” Peterson says. “It’s going to leach and poison the water.”

According to state and federal regulations, any solution containing greater than 5 parts per million (ppm) of silver must be collected and handled as hazardous waste.

CRE utilizes a chemical enzyme process to recover silver from the film base. The film base, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, is first chopped into tiny pieces three-quarters or an inch or smaller, then put into 10,000-gallon enzyme reactor tanks where the silver is removed from the base.

The plastic chips are dried, packed into storage containers, and shipped overseas where they are used to manufacture fiber, such as polyfill used in clothing and sleeping bags. The silver, after further processing, is formed into pure bars, then converted to small bb-size pellets for precious metal brokers, who purchase about 85 percent of the refinery output.

The company handles 1 million pounds of film per month. It recovers an average of eight to 10 ounces of silver per 100 pounds.

Gemark was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Newburgh, N.Y. Its facility in Exeter, Pa, specializes in recovery and refinement of silver and polyester-bearing material for the photographic industry. Silver is recovered using a washing process that removes the coating from the film, similar to a process used by CRE. It also recycles the polyester, selling it to companies that use it to manufacture everything from automobile parts to soda bottles.

Gemark Services of West Virginia handles document destruction, including shredding and burning of films and other confidential information in incinerators. The incineration facility is especially useful in cases where films cannot be separated from paper files, such as if the films and papers were soaked or if separating the materials was not cost effective.

Even with incineration, however, the silver is still recovered from the ash. The incinerators at the Bluebird, W. Va., plant also generate enough electricity to run the facility.

Peterson says document storage/destruction companies, even those in competitive situations where price is a factor, should offer their customers the option to recycle to ensure their silver-based products are disposed of properly. The cost, he says, would be minimal.

“They’re not even giving the customer the option,” he says. “I try to educate my customers. I tell then that they probably have some customers who want to make sure the right thing is done, so they should at least being this to their attention and offer it to them.

“They may be charging their customers 15 cents a pound to take shredded microfiche and then landfill it. If they charged them 20 or 25 cents a pound, instead of putting that silver back into the earth and polluting, they could have disposed of it properly.”

“Unfortunately, with the economics of the country today, it’s tough to convince somebody to spend more money for recycling as opposed to just tossing it,” says John Nohelty, president of FPC, Inc., in Hollywood, a Kodak company. Even so, Kodak, with the support of the motion picture industry, has become a leader in the certified destruction and recycling of millions of tons of motion picture film. Kodak’s Film Salvage Company, a division of FPC, operates a plant in Mountain City, Tenn., and another, FPC Italia, in Milan, Italy.

“The studios are very much in support of green initiatives,” Nohelty says. “It helps when you have an industry behind you on the same page as far as need. I think it really helps when an industry as a whole gets behind a cause.”

Another key factor for the industry support is to thwart piracy, which it says is costing it billions of dollars in losses each year.

Nohelty says the Tennessee plant would accept medical X-ray and graphic arts films if customers were will to ship the material there. The problem, he says, is their unwillingness to pay to get the films there.

“I think the world is shifting that way [toward recycling],” he says. “But at this point in time it’s still a personal choice. People want to be environmentally friendly but only if it doesn’t cost them anything.”

DeWitt notes that some in the document storage/destruction industry may not be aware that they have the potential to earn money by recycling because of the value of silver-based films — or even that there is silver in film.

He recalls going to a combined meeting of the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) and the Professional Records & Information Services Management (PRISM) about five years ago, where attendees expressed surprise when hearing about silver-based medical X-ray films.

“We were shocked at how many people came by and said, ‘You mean there’s silver in that film? We’ve been throwing it away or shredding it with the jackets on it.’”

DeWitt advises those companies that entire folders of documents and films can be sent to CRE, where the items will be separated, the silver recovered and the documents destroyed.

“I’ve met way too many people who throw thousands of pounds [of film] in the dump,” he says.

CRE is completing a 7,000-square-foot building dedicated to document destruction to complement its silver recovery program.

Gemark categorizes materials into recycled films and burnables, with film holding about a 2-to-1 margin. That number is changing, Peterson notes, as digital imaging replaces film in many applications.

DeWitt also notes that film usage is down, citing declines in processing silver recovery cartridges from a major national drug store chain and a drop in graphic arts films due to computer-to-plate technology. However, he reports that CRE has seen its highest volume in the last three years for recycling medical X-ray films.

Kodak’s Nohelty says there is ample justification for recycling efforts, from protecting the environment to reducing the demand for oil and raw materials.

He cited a Native American proverb as one of the best expressions he has heard about the environment: “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."