Cardboard Recycling in Malta

The journey of a cardboard box is a busy one in Malta.

The City of Malta hopes that once you have unpacked that new flat screen television that you are taking its box to the recycle bin behind Malta Opportunities, Inc., where it can be hauled to an old hanger at the old Airport to be compacted.

"People who recycle their cardboard in this fashion save us space in the City Landfill," Malta Mayor John Demarais said. "Space in that landfill is very expensive. If you drive out and look at the cardboard bails MOI makes out there, they are packed together and huge. If we had to put those in the landfill, it would fill up very fast."

So, cardboard of all kinds - MOI collects the cardboard dropped off behind their building and around town - is gathered by employees and residents and brought out to the airport and dumped in the hanger. From there, MOI's Dario Carrasco picks-up arm-loads of cardboard and tosses them into a yellow compactor. When he has enough carboard compacted, the bails are made and stacked in piles outside the hanger.

MOI Executive Director Dina Sainato-Meneely told the PCN that each bale weighs 700 pounds and in the past two years, a total of 560 bales have been bundled. She said that adds up to a total of 420,000 pounds of cardboard in the past two years, or 210 tons. Each ton of cardboard covers nine cubic yards (and a cubic yard covers approximately 100 square feet.) Sainato-Meneely estimates that a total of 1,890 cubic yards of landfill space has been saved (or 189,000 square feet) for a total of 4.3 acres.

"MOI goes through each piece of cardboard by hand to be sure there is no plastic, Styrofoam, packaging materials or any other garbage mixed in," she said. "We need everyone's help to be sure the cardboard is clean, and that household garbage isn't mixed it. There are garbage bins located behind MOI at the big carboard receptacles."

Sainato-Meneely said that aside from the cardboard dropped off behind MOI, select MOI clients go around town to local businesses and homes and can take any type of thin, or thick corrugated cardboard to be bailed. For many years, the final step in the cardboard's Malta life was to be hauled out of town via semi-truck and shipped to the western part of the state, but that all changed about five years ago.

Mayor Demarais is also the former City Public Works Director and he said when Smurfit Stone closed in Frenchtown, Mont., the challenge for the City became what to do with the cardboard that was bailed.

"Every once in a while, we would be able to get a load shipped out of town, but it had to be pristine cardboard," Mayor Demarais said. "It couldn't have rocks in it or be wet at all, or they just wouldn't take it."

For the past handful of years, the cardboard started backing up, sometimes being stored in the City Shop in hopes of keeping it clean. Malta's cardboard had, for the most part, hit a dead end.

Enter Terri and Glen Simms, organic farmers in Malta.

"I have to blame my son for that," Terri joked. She said that her son, Matt, came up with the idea of turning cardboard into compost. "We take it and run it through a grinder and then mix it with manure, hay, and old grain and stuff. And, luckily we had a lot of snow this winter, we used it to make the cardboard moist."

Terri said her and Glen have been collecting cardboard from the City of Malta (via) MOI for about the last two years, but only this last winter started to turn it into compost. She said that she and Glen hauled about 600 bales of cardboard and Bishop Building, Inc. helped haul an estimated 600 or so more out to the Sims' spread.

"We balance the carbon and nitrogen components along with the moisture," Terri said. "Then it is pushed into rows with a frontend loader to control the heat of the piles. It usually takes about six months to a year for the completed product the way we are doing it now and we will put the finished product on our organic fields to enrich the soil."

Terri admitted that the Sims are still in the experimental stages and the couple is learning to adjust as they go but they do believe that the compost they create with the cardboard will be a great, natural fertilizer for their soil.

After a long process with many moving parts and groups doing their part, cardboard in Malta seems to have found a final resting spot at the Sims' farm instead of in the City Landfill.