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Cloudy early with peeks of sunshine expected late. High 68F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph..
Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 54F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
The Juno recycling facility in Toledo begins its process by taking large bails of shredded garbage and loading them onto a large conveyor belt. (Photos by Mathew Brock)
Material is loaded into a device called a Juno Clave, which functions like a pressure cooker by steaming material to sanitize and separate paper fibers from contamination, like leftover food.
After it is steamed, waste is loaded onto a long conveyor belt with multiple devices designed to separate mixed in metals, glass and grit.
Separated paper fibers are processed into rough container board material and used to make new products, such as coffee cup heat protectors.
Members of the Aug. 5 tour group inspect the end product of the Juno recycling process.
The Juno recycling facility in Toledo begins its process by taking large bails of shredded garbage and loading them onto a large conveyor belt. (Photos by Mathew Brock)
Material is loaded into a device called a Juno Clave, which functions like a pressure cooker by steaming material to sanitize and separate paper fibers from contamination, like leftover food.
After it is steamed, waste is loaded onto a long conveyor belt with multiple devices designed to separate mixed in metals, glass and grit.
Separated paper fibers are processed into rough container board material and used to make new products, such as coffee cup heat protectors.
Members of the Aug. 5 tour group inspect the end product of the Juno recycling process.
TOLEDO — Around a dozen people from across the state gathered in Toledo last Friday morning to take the first guided tour of Georgia-Pacific’s Juno recycling facility.
The Toledo facility was one of many stops on the Oregon Manufacturing Roadshow put on by the Oregon Business and Industry nonprofit organization. Members of the tour group who visited the facility Aug. 5 included environmental lawyers and advocates from around Oregon, as well as Oregon State Sen. James Manning Jr.
The Juno facility first began test operations in April 2021 before gradually ramping up and becoming fully operational in February 2022. Georgia-Pacific has been working with local sanitary services like Dahl Disposal and Thompson’s Sanitary to divert previously unrecyclable garbage from local waste streams to the facility. Material is also sourced from Lane and Marion counties.
Juno uses newly developed technology that extracts paper fibers and other recyclable material from shredded garbage that would be otherwise bound for landfills. Participating sanitary service providers shred usable waste, bind it into bales and ship them to the Juno facility near the Georgia-Pacific mill in Toledo.
Once there, the bales are loaded onto a massive conveyer belt and become feedstock to be loaded into a large pressure-cooker-like device called a Juno Clave. Inside the machine, the feedstock is cooked with steam to sanitize it. The process also separates paper fibers and food particles in items like food containers — coffee cups, pizza boxes, paper plates — which would be otherwise unrecyclable.
“One of the advantages of Juno is how many materials we can process that were previously unrecyclable,” said Franz Cosenza, the Juno facility manager. “Where we started was food-contact paper, like coffee cups, and how many of those are single-use and would otherwise go in the garbage. It’s those materials that are ideal for us now.”
The contents of the Juno Clave are then discharged onto another conveyor belt where denser recyclable materials are filtered out. For example, a powerful magnetic belt attracts ferrous metals in the mix, such as discarded tools, nails and other items, lifting them off the conveyor belt and depositing them in a bin.
Later down the line, a machine called an eddy current separator uses a magnetic field to vibrate non-ferrous metals, such as aluminum, copper and die-cast metals, off the belt, separating them into yet another bin to be independently recycled.
Other materials and small particles like broken glass and sand are also separated during the process.
At the end of the line, remaining unrecyclable materials, such as plastic and textiles, are disposed of while the extracted paper fibers are sent as a slurry to the nearby paper mill and used to make container board. The rough cardboard material is often used in items like coffee cup heat protectors.
Currently, the facility is diverting an estimated 50 percent of newly recyclable material from landfills with a goal to increase that rate to 70 percent in the near future. Eventually, program administrators hope the project will be able to incorporate a way to recycle plastics and textiles to take the diversion rate up to 90 percent. That mostly depends on when an economically feasible method of recycling those materials is developed.
The Juno facility is the first of its kind, but facility staff said there has been interest in building similar facilities around North America. So far, Vancouver, British Columbia, which has a goal of becoming the “greenest” city in the world, has shown interest, as well as several large U.S. theme parks that deal with an abundance of food-contaminated material, according to a Juno spokesperson.
The Toledo facility processes around 200 tons of material a day, and the next Juno facility, wherever it may be, would have a goal of processing around 1,000 tons a day, which would cater to a municipality with a population of 1 million or more people.
Learn more about the Juno recycling project by going online at juno.gppackaging.com.
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