Keep Port St. Lucie Beautiful
Community Shred Event a safe, easy way to safely dispose of important documents
On May 30, Keep Port St. Lucie Beautiful hosted its first-ever drive-thru paper shredding event at Port St. Lucie High School.
Support for a paper shredding event was clear, thanks to residents’ feedback at this year’ s Citizen Summit. Residents were excited they could protect their personal information while ensuring important documents were being shredded and disposed of safely rather than added to the landfill.
Hosting this inaugural event allowed KPSLB to learn more about the paper recycling process. For example, how does shredded paper make its way from our community event to being transformed into a new product, like a cardboard box or egg carton? What are the unseen benefits of recycling paper?
Here is a brief summary of the paper recycling process:
• Discarded paper is collected and then sorted at a Material Recovery Facility, then baled and sold to a paper mill. Pricing of these bales is determined by several factors: contamination, density, type of paper and even travel distance.
• At the mill, the recycled paper undergoes the cleaning and transformation process:
• The paper goes through a pulper, a machine that breaks down the paper fiber.
• The pulp then goes through the cleaning, screening and de-inking process.
• The fibers are flattened, heated and rolled out, creating a continuous sheet of paper.
• Depending on the quality, the recycled paper rolls are sold to manufacturers to then use in a range of products: cardboard boxes, paper towels, cardstock, food packaging and insulation material. Paper that can’ t be recycled such as pizza boxes can be composted or used in waste-to-energy facilities.
The impacts of recycling one ton of paper are substantial: 17 trees are saved, 7,000 gallons of water are conserved and 4,000 kilowatts of energy are left unspent. Paper recycling supports a circular economy, converting waste into a resource for new products as well.
Events like the Community Shred Event are a vital part of this incredible recycling process: reusing resources, saving valuable space in landfills and conserving and sometimes even producing energy, all while providing an important service to our community.
KPSLB looks forward to hosting this event again in the future!
www. CityofPSL. com / KPSLB • 772-871-7000 • KPSLB @ cityofpsl. com
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