Recycling Brings Profits : Corporations Taking Wastepaper to the Bank

WASHINGTON — Corporations nationwide are turning wastepaper into money.

American Telephone & Telegraph last year saved $1 million in disposal costs and made a $365,000 profit by recycling its office wastepaper instead of sending it to a trash heap.

The Bank of America earns an estimated $354,000 a year, while cutting $62,000 from its annual waste-hauling expenses, by participating in a recycling program.

Similarly, MCI Communications Corp. picked up an extra $30,352 last year and saved $7,000 in disposal expenses by selling 42 tons of used computer printout and ledger sheets to companies that turned the stuff into toilet paper and paper towels.

Corporate paper-recycling programs, once public relations gimmicks designed to placate restive environmentalists, increasingly are being used by companies that realize there is serious money to be saved and earned in the process.

Exact figures are not available for the number of companies participating in recycling programs, according to Bill Hancock, a spokesman for the American Paper Institute in New York. But he estimates that corporations now recycle about 200,000 tons of paper annually, contrasted with almost nothing 10 years ago.

The recycling programs are enterprises born of necessity, and an acknowledgment that the idea of the paperless office was a much ballyhooed notion that will likely never come to pass.

If anything, the paper load is getting heavier.

Each office worker produced an average of between half and three-quarters of a pound of wastepaper each working day in 1979, according to the Office Paper Recycling Service (OPRS), a New York recycling consulting group. Today, the average office worker produces at least a pound a day, the group said.

Ironically, much of that excess paper is being generated by computers and other electronic communications systems that were supposed to make paper eventually obsolete.

Disposal Costs Higher

“Back in the 1970s, people were talking about the ‘paperless office’ and the ‘checkless society,’ but I wasn’t buying any of that,” said Burke Stinson, spokesman for AT&T;’s paper recycling project.

Computers can store information for decades and zap it from one place to another in an instant, but everybody wants to hold on to a computer printout of some sort, said Stinson.

With the paper mountain growing and dumping space shrinking, disposal costs have skyrocketed. A New Jersey company that paid an average of $5 a ton for trash disposal in 1970 now pays about $100 a ton, according to state environmental officials.

The disposal price increases have created a keen interest in corporate paper-recycling programs, one that has companies from Australia to New York seeking services from OPRS.