Just Don’t Shred the Donuts

Shredded coconut and shredded paper might not be an obvious pair, but on Friday they went well together at Recycle Ann Arbor’s Drop-Off Station.

Anyone who dropped off paper to be shredded got offered cider and donuts from Washtenaw Dairy. They also got up to 100 pounds of paper shredded for free either by a special truck on site or at a remote location, transported there by a bonded and insured driver to ensure the documents’ security. By early afternoon, about 12,000 pounds of paper had been shredded.

Mary Wakefield brought two grocery bags full of paper on Friday afternoon. She has her own shredder, but said she was way behind in doing it herself. When she heard about the event, she decided to cull her files and bring over a load.

The shredding itself wasn’t particularly dramatic – if you expected to watch a mechanical maw do its work (as The Chronicle had secretly hoped for), you’d have been disappointed. A chute juts out from the truck, and a bin of paper is pulled into the bottom of the chute. A technician operates controls on the outside of the truck. Pretty tame stuff, but effective.

Steve Sheldon, Recycle Ann Arbor’s operations manager, estimated that about 250 people had used the service by mid-afternoon. They were open until 4:30 p.m. Friday, continuing Saturday from 9:30 am. to 4:30 p.m.

One of the main goals of the event was to highlight other services offered by the Drop-Off Station, Sheldon said. As vehicles pulled into the entrance off of Ellsworth Road, Sheldon or one of RAA’s other staffers would ask the driver (assuming they stopped) whether they’d been there before. If the answer was no, they’d get a flyer listing all the items they could recycle at no cost (textiles, egg cartons, styrofoam, etc.), drop off for a fee (including automotive fluids, fluorescent lights, small appliances and such) or buy (compost and mulch).

Sheldon’s goal is to make Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County a “zero waste zone” – which means everyone needs to be on board with recycling everything they have.

Much of what gets dropped off is eventually sold in bulk. Newsprint, for example, brings in about $35 per ton – higher quality office paper is closer to $45. (As part of the deal for doing the free shredding event, the two firms who partnered with Recycle Ann Arbor – American Data Security and NPR (formerly Nelson’s Paper Shredding) – get to keep the paper to resell.)

The global financial crisis has hit the market for most materials, Sheldon says. Scrap metal, for example – everything except copper and aluminum, which are sold separately – could be sold for about $320 per ton this summer. Now, it’s down to about $120.

Donuts from Washtenaw Dairy don’t cost nearly that much.