This company truly recycles

In response to the article “Green Biz Feeling Blue: Plunging scrap prices wreak havoc on recycling industry,” (Jan. 19), we at the Indianapolis location of AbitibiBowater, North America’s largest newsprint manufacturer and home of the Paper Retriever paper-recycling program, want to assure those who deposit paper in the green and yellow Abitibi Paper Retriever bins that all paper in this program is recycled and not landfilled.

The article stated that the contractor which collects much of Indianapolis’ curbside recycling is “free to handle the curbside materials as it sees fit—including dumping them at the landfill if it can’t find buyers.”

With the dropping values of recyclable commodities, for many companies it is cheaper to dispose of recyclable paper in landfills rather than incur the cost of collecting, sorting and recycling them. Abitibi-Bowater and the Paper Retriever program operate a full-circle recycling model where there is never a need or consideration to dispose paper in a landfill. We take the paper collected in Paper Retriever bins, bundle it and ship it to our paper mills.

Even with the falling prices for recyclable paper, our company is still offering the same cash rebates to our non-profit bin hosts for the paper collected in our bins. Our paper mills want and need paper. The Paper Retriever partnerships with solid-waste-management districts, municipalities and non-profit locations are not only an environmental solution; they are an economic solution as well. We look forward to continuing our assistance to communities trying to make sound environmental decisions regarding their recyclable wastes.

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