The owner of a Bloomington-Normal recycling company says he’s amazed with how technology is changing the business – even if other economic forces can make things challenging.
Todd Shumaker is owner and director of procurement at Midwest Fiber Recycling, which has six locations including a full-service recycling facility on White Oak Road in west Normal. They have about 80 employees locally.
“We have some areas where we’ve actually put in physical robots that use artificial intelligence, and they can help us identify the different materials coming down a conveyer belt,” Shumaker said. “So if we want that belt to basically be full of paper or paper products, the video will notify the robot of when something non-paper is coming down, and it’ll use an arm that’ll use air suction to collect it, and then separate it from the paper and get it back into the plastic line.”
Being on the receiving end of recyclables gives Midwest Fiber a unique vantage point on the economy too.
“The economy has slowed down a little bit, so we are seeing less recyclables being brought to the curb. Maybe there’s a little less spending. People are maybe buying less material in boxes,” he said.
Costs are up for many businesses, including Midwest Fiber, and supply-chain issues persist.
“The business operating environment is a challenge right now,” Shumaker said. “With lead times on equipment – forklifts just rolled in that were ordered about a year ago. You just have to think a lot further out than we used to, some of the major equipment repairs we have to have.”
Midwest Fiber gets material from many people who live in Bloomington-Normal and use single-stream recycling. People are generally pretty good about knowing which kind of paper products, aluminum or tin can be recycled, Shumaker said. Plastics are more confusing.
“We have lots of things manufactured in plastic. Lots of things have the recycling logo on them. But just because it’s plastic and it has the little chasing arrows (logo) on the bottom, doesn’t mean it can go in the recycling bin,” Shumaker said.
Shumaker said a good rule of thumb is that plastic is OK in the bin when it’s some sort of bottle with a screw-on cap, like a milk jug or a laundry detergent jug. Though there are some exceptions.
Plastic bags – like the kind you'd get with groceries – also should not go into your single-stream recycling. Stores often offer separate recycling paths for those bags.
The Normal-based Ecology Action Center’s Recycling Coach online tool can help you make good recycling decisions.
Midwest Fiber’s paper-shredding division, Confidential On-Site Paper Shredding, is marking its 20th anniversary with a free Community Shred Day event from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, Oct. 28. You can bring your documents to Midwest Fiber on White Oak Road to be shredded, with all that material being recycled and turned back into new products likely within a couple weeks.
