Summer 2024 Newsletter

Volume 11, Issue 1

CCC Visits Three North American Carton End Markets With Recycling Partners

Carton Council of Canada recently conducted visits to three of North America’s six end markets for cartons.

At the end of March, Council Managing Director Isabelle Faucher travelled to Des Moines, Iowa with the Executive Directors of British Columbia’s Encorp Pacific and of the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation (ABCRC), Cindy Coutts and Guy West. They went there to meet with Continuus Materials, a manufacturer of roof cover boards that uses whole post-consumer cartons. Ms. Coutts was joined by Jenn Robson, Director of Projects at Encorp.

Posing in front of bales of Canadian cartons at Continuus Materials in Des Moines, from left to right: Jenn Robson, Cindy Coutts, Guy West, Isabelle Faucher, Marc Lower and Matt Spencer.

Encorp Pacific and ABCRC manage their respective provinces’ deposit return programs for beverage containers that include cartons. Since both organizations contract with Continuus to recycle their cartons, the two wished to assess its performance as part of their due diligence process and gauge the prospect for increased intake. During the visit led by Continuus’s Marc Lower and Matt Spencer, bales of cartons originating from both programs were actually observed on the factory floor. Currently, Continuus Materials processes approximately 10,000 tons of cartons per year, much of them sourced from Canada through leading recyclable materials broker, ReMM Group. Given the high demand for their boards, the company is working on plans for a second plant.

At Continuus Materials, after shredding and pressing, post-consumer cartons mixed with recovered LDPE plastics are formed into a board, and a layer of recycled kraft paper is applied. The board is then trimmed to size.

Later on, in early April, Isabelle joined colleagues from Carton Council of North America and representatives of member organizations at Sustana’s plant in De Pere, Wisconsin. This is one of the two facilities where the company produces premium quality recycled fibres from recovered paper products, including Canadian-sourced gable top and aseptic cartons. On the tour led by plant manager Dan Bassindale, the group was able to see the 130-foot drying tower that Sustana recently installed to turn De Pere into a “dry facility”. This system has enabled the mill to output dry pulp instead of wet. Given its much longer shelf life, dry pulp can be shipped anywhere in the world, which dramatically expands Sustana’s market.

De Pere’s new 130-foot drying tower has made it possible for Sustana to ship its premium recycled pulp anywhere in the world.

Sustana’s Jean-Sébastien Foisy, Patrick Cloutier, Pierre-Luc Tessier and Richard Croteau in front of the Lévis mill’s new washers.

And finally, later in the month, Isabelle together with Mario Parenteau and Maude Tessier-Parenteau of Innofibre, an innovation centre for cellulosic products located in Trois-Rivières, Québec, met up with Sustana’s Jean-Sébastien Foisy, David Vallières and Aaron Ling at their Lévis facility. CCC has partnered with Innofibre on a number of applied research projects. The goal was to permit the Innofibre team to gather information for one of these projects, which concerns the development of a recycling application for the plastic and polyal residual materials from carton repulping operations. This visit, being CCC’s first since 2022, also provided an opportunity to receive the latest news on Sustana’s carton recycling plans and observe its recent capital investments. These include new washers that have significantly increased the overall quality and yield of the fibre recovered from cartons and other paper products.