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Making green by being green
WASTE-PAPER-YARD
Pratt Industries' Conyers campus recycles more than 1,000 pounds of paper a day into cardboard boxes and products. - photo by Submitted Photo

For some companies, being environmentally friendly isn’t just a matter of doing good by the planet and future generations. It’s also good for business. Here are a few Rockdale County businesses that built their success around providing excellent products and services while reducing waste and carbon footprints.

Dixie Graphics

For Denise Hindle, co-owner of Dixie Graphics located at 2074 East Park Drive, the commitment to being green was made long before it became a fad.

"We’ve been that way since the late 90s," said the second generation small business owner. "We’ve started in this direction before it was a popular decision."

Hindle admits there was a learning curve and that the motivation to change initially came from a major corporate customer that had gone green in their practices.

"It’s been over the last couple of years we’ve been involved in the green councils and green planning we realized the importance," she said.

Now the family-owned printing and graphics company, which started in Gwinnett County in 1980 and moved to Conyers in 2003, is a highly touted example of green business success. Dixie Graphics was the featured printer for the 2009 Enviro Expo in Atlanta, has been recognized by the Forestry Stewardship Council, and is involved in the green business community.

The company is one of the first in Georgia to use paper made from the waste products of sugar mills, and it uses soy-based inks that have a low amount of petroleum based VOCs (volatile organic compounds).

And because the company committed early on to green printing practices and materials, it can offer green printing for the same price as non-green printing, said Hindle.

"The sacrifice in quality is non-existent these days," she said. "They days when you’re thinking you’re going to get an inferior product or something that looks like a brown paper bag is out of the picture these days."

Nearly 99.9 percent of her customers products use recycled or green products. Although a very few clients are still reluctant to let go of using virgin materials, said Hindle, many of their larger clients, such as Medicare, are green.

The company’s commitment to green living is not just a marketing ploy, or what Hindle termed "greenwashing," but it also shows up in other ways. This year, the company welcomed the Rockdale County Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners onto the land behind their business to grow crops to donate to the Food Bank, and employees have been part of a co-op garden in the past.

"It’s been a very successful road for us," she said, adding that the company is planning to expand its facilities by 55,000 square feet and add six additional positions. "Everybody loves being part of a mission that has a good purpose."

But she added, being green also makes sense from a profit perspective. "That’s the main concern with the business," she said. "We can’t make a recycled product for the sake of making a recycled product. We have to stay in business."

Pratt Industries

While recycling may be an occasional activity for most of us, for one industry headquartered in Rockdale, it’s a multi-million dollar business.

Pratt Industries, which has a 114 acre Conyers campus off Sigman Road built in 1995, recycles and converts waste paper into corrugated boxes and other cardboard products.

The Conyers millugator – the term coined by company CEO Anthony Pratt for the combined paper mill, corrugator and box making plant – recycles more than 1,000 tons of paper daily, according to Pratt spokesperson Michael Oregan.

"That paper could stretch from Atlanta to New York every day," said Oregan.

By recycling, the plant also prevents about 1,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions from going into the atmosphere and saves about 17,000 trees.

Although recycling helps the planet, "It’s good for business too," said Oregan.

Oregan said late founder Richard Pratt made the decision to go into recycling.

The company came to the US in the 1980s with a mill in Macon and soon made the jump to recycled paper after recycled paper boxes were allowed to be used on train shipping systems, said Oregan.

Pratt, a US branch of the Australian-based Visy Industries, also has two other recycled paper millugators – one in Staten Island, New York and the latest built in 2009 in Shreveport, La. – along with more than 50 box plants throughout the country. The company is committed to being green in other ways.

The Conyers campus, which employs more than 400, has a clean energy plant which gasifies the waste products from the paper making process and turns them into energy to power the mill. That energy reduces the carbon footprint by 100,000 tons of emissions a year.

Within the company, employees are also encouraged to recycle any waste generated Oregan said.

"The goal is to move towards becoming a zero waste company," he said.

Cartridge World

One Rockdale retail store is doing its best to keep the dumpsters empty by recycling most of the products that come through its doors.

Cartridge World, located at 2239 Highway 20 SE #G, doesn’t throw away much, taking products from its customers and recycling most of all the toners or ink cartridges.

When the toner materials come through the doors at Cartridge World, Senior Technician Aquenda Dunn, takes them and leaves little waste behind.

He reuses the plastic cartridge casings, refilling them with toner, and then either reuses the aluminum rods and pieces in the toner cartridge, or collects them in a box in his shop and takes them all to the recycling center.

For ink cartridge, the process is similar, and very little gets thrown away. The cartridge goes through a washing process and then gets refilled with ink.

"The ones that normally would have been thrown away, go through a cleaning process and get reused," Dunn said.

If the digital chip on the cartridge doesn’t allow for further uses, they still don’t throw the container away. The chip gets broken down for its copper, and the plastic cartridge gets grinded down and recycled.

Cartridge World, celebrating its fourth anniversary, also hosts a recycling program, where they allow groups such as schools and churches to bring in their cartridges and toners and give back credits and money for fundraisers.

The store’s motto is, "Used cartridges are not broken - just empty."