For newspapers’ pressrooms to operate efficiently and profitably, an innovative recycling program is required and printing facilities as diverse as the Chicago Tribune and South Florida’s Sun Sentinel achieve those goals by partnering with CellMark Recycling.
For Roy Carlson, senior pre-print operations manager for the Chicago Tribune for 31 years, working as a team with CellMark has delivered maximum value and many innovations for the recycling program, which is also part of Carlson’s management portfolio.
Even after decades of reliance on CellMark, Carlson appreciates the company’s new ideas for making his job easier, gaining new operational efficiencies, and even generating more income for the printing facilities’ recycling stream.
“As with many pressrooms, we print many papers other than the Chicago Tribune and operate multiple distribution centers throughout the Greater Chicago area,” said Carlson. “During 2007, we recognized the inefficiency of our delivery trucks returning from the distribution centers empty.
“CellMark provided us with appropriate containers to place in the trucks and haul waste from the distribution centers. We were able to reduce costs by discontinuing our contract with a third-party hauler to collect waste from those centers thanks to partnering with CellMark.”
As the relationship matured, Carlson asked CellMark to assume various recycling tasks the printing facility had been doing. The Tribune had purchased balers to remove plastic waste at the distribution centers, but the work was eventually given to CellMark. Before working with CellMark, the Tribune used a third-party collector to remove all waste, even garbage, which required nine garbage pulls monthly.
Partnering with CellMark also reduced those garbage pulls to twice a month. Waste hauling costs less and more tonnage of paper waste, plastic and cardboard could be moved to the recycling stream instead of being added to garbage and landfills. According to Carlson, this increased the paper’s recycling income from CellMark and helped the paper operate with more of a focus on being green and environmentally conscious.
The Sun-Sentinel, South Florida’s largest circulation newspaper, has also benefited from CellMark’s thorough understanding of pressroom operations from the inside. After retiring from his pressroom leadership role at The Sun-Sentinel, Tom Reilly, a 42-year veteran of the newspaper industry, became a representative for CellMark. He now works with his former associate Steve Tharayil, team leader for 27 years, at The Sun Sentinel’s Deerfield Beach, Fla. printing facility.
“Having worked for so many years with Tom, his move to CellMark is simply a continuation of our partnership to keep our operations as efficient as possible,” said Tharayil. “As pressroom managers know, paper rolls can be damaged during transportation to a facility and become useless. CellMark buys those damaged rolls from us and recycles or sells them to smaller printers, which generates revenues for us.”
With Reilly’s many years leading pressroom operations and long-term relationships with people throughout the industry, he can walk into a facility and “talk the talk” with pressroom personnel and operations managers as well as C-suite executives.
Another of Reilly’s former colleagues at The Sun-Sentinel, Joel Meyer, who has been the director of manufacturing and facilities for 31 years, expanded on Tharayil’s comments. According to Meyer, CellMark’s comprehensive approach to recycling waste for newspaper print operations was evident as soon as CellMark became The Sun Sentinel’s recycling vendor more than 15 years ago.
“Initially, we had contracts with local companies to remove our scrap,” said Meyer. “Not only did CellMark work with those local companies to obtain the best prices for our waste, but also introduced additional resources the local vendors didn’t offer. For example, CellMark recommended we wait to recycle our aluminum plates until there was a full truckload and when we could obtain the best price.”
Meyer explained the value of The Sun Sentinel’s CellMark partnership isn’t always just common waste issues.
“When The Sun-Sentinel moved our editorial operations to a new facility, the building was filled with old furniture,” said Meyer. “We could have just disposed of it, but CellMark helped us recycle it properly, which saved us the thousands of dollars we would have had to spend to remove it.”
Reilly added, “That with my operations background along with Cellmark’s Recycling innovations and worldwide marketing systems, this is the perfect match to serve the recycling needs of the newspaper industry.”
For more info contact -
Tom Reilly
General Manager of Operations
CellMark Recycling
Cell: (239) 560-4561
Email: thomas.reilly@cellmark.com
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