Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Quick turnaround

By Tim Wacker
Staff Writer

Shortly before midnight Monday a "Kerry-Edwards" banner fluttered to the Fleet Center floor and Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention came to a close.

For that banner, the night was still young.

It joined 2,400 pounds of pamphlets, brochures and miscellaneous paper on an odyssey through the Merrimack Valley yesterday that ended 14 hours later right where it started: at the FleetCenter. Only now, the red, white and blue banner was a red, white, blue, black, pink and green commemorative poster.

"It's a recycling miracle," said Joe Garcia, an account representative with Recycle America, the recycling arm of waste industry giant Waste Management, Inc. "Just to see it go from waste paper to poster in 12 or 14 hours, it's impressive."

It was also a lot of work. Behind the miracle were months of phone calls and cajoling by Andover recycling consultant Pat Scanlon, owner of Scanlon Associates. It all ended yesterday with Scanlon tethered to a cell phone, leading truckers, paper mills, graphic designers and printers through the logistical nightmare that is the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. All under 24 hours.

An elated Scanlon watched as the freshly printed posters started piling up at The Journeyman Press in Newburyport yesterday afternoon.

Normally, recycling is a more laid-back business.

But Scanlon arranged the high-speed refuse-to-reuse program to make a point. He's a trash man by trade and recycler by choice, and a couple of months ago he saw the DNC as a chance to deliver a message being left out of all the campaign speeches.

"This is an opportunity to highlight recycling for a national audience," Scanlon said. "The whole concept of taking trash and, in 24 hours, turning it into a usable product that some one could want to frame and put on their walls. That's the beauty of this."

The day got off to a rocky start when the truck driver Scanlon arranged to pick up the paper at the Fleet Center called at 7:20 a.m. and said his vehicle was being scrutinized by bomb-sniffing dogs and security technicians wielding X-ray machines.

The expected three-hour delay ended up being only an hour and by 8:45 a.m. a garbage truck pulled up to a conveyor at the west end of a long mill building owned by Haverhill Paperboard.

Haverhill has been converting similar refuse into usable paper since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Plant manager Joe Michaud was a little reluctant to invite strangers to view the noisy, high-speed process that played such a vital link in Scanlon's schedule, but the two once worked together and Michaud relented.

"We were asked to do this by Pat and, since he worked for us, we don't mind," Michaud said. "And it's good that people be conscious of recycling. It's a good thing for people to want to recycle."

The political signs and assorted paper refuse rumbled up the conveyor and dropped into a vat that ground them into a watery pulp in a matter of minutes. The slurry was then screened, filtered, pressed into sheets, baked, rolled and sliced into 35,000 24-by-40-inch print-ready sheets about 90 minutes later.

"It's really beat-the-clock," Scanlon said. "But if everything goes right, we can fly through these processes."

North Andover graphics company Advance Reproduction designed the posters with help from middle school students. The poster designs were put into computer files and sent to Journeyman printers and the preparations were over. Everyone involved did the work for free, partly because of their history with Scanlon. Journeyman owner Steve Silverstein said he signed on because he liked the idea.

"There's no such thing as bad publicity, unless you're Martha Stewart," Silverstein said. "And I do a lot of political printing. Pat asked me and I'm a guy who can't say no."

At 4:30 p.m., the brand new posters were heading back to Boston. Scanlon admits to being a Kerry Democrat, but it's not politics that fueled his effort. It's a dedication to a different cause that he wants to see more no matter who is in the White House.

"I'd help Genghis Khan recycle if he wanted to recycle," Scanlon said. "And I think this is one of biggest promotional efforts for recycling that I've ever seen. To take this stuff from waste to finished product in that short a time, it's never been done before."