Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007
Mathew D. Chakola strolled through one of Maryland’s largest recycling paper mills on a recent rainy Thursday and remembered how he forfeited a social life 20 years ago to engineer the Williamsport plant.
Through the roar of humming generators, spinning cylinders and steaming pipes, Chakola and his vice president of operations, Ryan Gillet of Frederick, also discussed what lies ahead for their new company, EnviroCycle Paper Products, a spin-off of Chakola’s Maryland Paper.
The new Frederick company is just beginning to manufacture wine labels, car mats and construction site paper. Tom Geppi co-owns the new endeavor.
At the far end of the plant, Chakola and Gillet eyed mountains of cardboard and newspaper that are recycled round-the-clock into 3,000-pound rolls of paper.
Together, Maryland Paper and EnviroCycle Paper accept about 400 tons of waste paper each day from recycling services along the East Coast, paying from $120 to $180 per ton. Nearly every four minutes, a truck hauls in a load of waste paper.
‘‘I built it from the ground up,” Chakola, of Middletown, said of the plant. ‘‘If we’re not the largest buyer of recycled material in the area, we’re one of them.”
In leather loafers, he and Gillet stepped over puddles from dripping pipes and steaming dryers. They peeked into a cauldron of water boiling used newspaper, cardboard and office paper products into a thick pulp. The dark, fiber soup smelled faintly of sewage.
Located just outside of Hagerstown, Maryland Paper since 1989 has sold the massive bulk rolls to roofing companies, which convert them into felt paper for asphalt projects. In 2005, Chakola and Geppi created EnviroCycle Inc. of Frederick to market the brown paper in other forms — from clothing tags to temporary car mats.
After recruiting Gillet, EnviroCycle has been banking on a new product: Rhimax Paper, an organic, 100 percent recycled alternative to red rosin paper used in building construction projects, which can also be used for landscaping and other applications. EnviroCycle launched Rhimax in the spring.
Small local companies such as ProFast Flooring of Ijamsville are using Rhimax. So far, Ashby Lumbar in Berkeley, Calif., and Oak Gardens in Oaks, Pa., are the only retailers carrying it. Connie Paton, a retail associate for Oak Gardens, said the product has not yet proven popular there, but she anticipates it will soon. She said its label touts a number of uses that could confuse consumers shopping for weed bedding.
‘‘Even those of us who work here couldn’t figure out what it was for,” Paton said. ‘‘But we’ll keep it on our shelves. It’s a good idea. Sometimes it takes a while to catch on. ... People are getting ‘greener’ every day.”
Rhimax may soon appear in nationwide chains such as Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Home Depot, selling for about $12 per 100-foot roll, Gillet said.
Last month, EnviroCycle partnered with Easy Gardener Products Inc. of Waco, Texas, which already has products in big-box stores, to market the weed-blocking version of Rhimax. The companies are touting Rhimax as made from 100 percent recycled materials, as thicker than comparable products and as a paper that biodegrades easily, leaving no toxins or bleach.
‘‘We’re just beginning some of these conversations,” Gillet said. ‘‘We’re ahead of the curve for a startup company. We’ve secured some big contracts.”
An organic-clothing store in San Francisco purchased tags for its merchandise and several wineries on the West Coast have requested the brown paper with their logos.
‘‘They want organic labels, even if they’re not making organic wines,” Gillet said.
As Chakola and Gillet continued the tour, a rapid conveyor belt lifted the beige pulp, where Chakola touched the warm water speeding by. At that point, the mixture was only 1 percent fiber, he said.
It cooled into paper on the 12-foot-wide conveyer belt, and snaked quickly through 68 drying barrels and into a large roll. Four round blades sliced the sheet into four rolls. Chakola tapped the paper as it spun by.
An engineer who designed the Tamko Building Products manufacturing plant in Frederick that opened in 1978, Chakola had built the Maryland Paper mill to operate 24 hours a day and produce up to 700 tons of paper per day.
In bulk, a roll can be up to 7 miles long and weigh upward of 3,800 pounds. Twenty-five loads of 15 rolls of the bulk paper, each nearly twice Chakola’s height, are trucked out each day. Some are shipped abroad. Rhimax and other products for EnviroCycle will move through the plant the same way, they said.
After 20 years of managing and maintaining the plant, Chakola said he is still impressed with both the volume of paper the mill can produce and with the mountains of newspaper and cardboard products that feed the process every day.
