If you recycle this newspaper – after carefully reading it from cover to cover – it will be sent to a plant in Mexico, where it will be made into paperboard that’s purchased by the U.S. Postal Service to make overnight mailing envelopes.

Recycle your cardboard? It goes to a plant in Oklahoma, where it’s made into the paper liner board for gypsum wallboard, which then gets shipped to Fort Dodge, where it’s attached to wallboard and shipped out across the country.

Those plastic pop bottles you returned for a deposit? They’re shipped to a plant in Alabama that makes them into automotive body parts such as bumpers. Crushed aluminum cans and bottles are sent to various facilities to make new cans and bottles.

“Recycling as an industry has matured,” said Mick Barry, vice president of Des Moines-based Mid America Recycling Co. “It’s no longer the feel-good industry it was in the ’70s and early ’80s. What we really are is not recyclers; we’re raw materials suppliers. We supply a recovered raw material so that a finished product can be made.”

The company, whose gross annual revenues exceed $85 million, was founded in Des Moines as Container Recovery Inc. in 1978 to process bottles and cans so retailers could comply with Iowa’s bottle deposit law. It has since grown to handle more than 1 billion tons of recyclable materials annually at 14 plants throughout the Midwest, from Minneapolis to San Antonio.

Iowa’s largest recycling processor, Mid America is now working with the city of Des Moines to determine the future direction of the city’s recycling program.

Already a multistate operation by the mid-1990s, Mid America in May 2005 purchased Dallas-based Vista Fibers, which operates recycling plants in Texas and Louisiana. Earlier this month, Mid America expanded its Texas holdings with the acquisition of Rock-Tenn Converting Co.’s paper recovery operation in Dallas.

Through its internal growth and acquisitions, Mid America has become the largest recycler not only in Iowa but also in Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas, and is likely the largest privately owned multimaterial recycler in the country, Barry said.

“One of our primary growth markets is here in Des Moines,” he said, where its plant processes about 600 tons of recyclable material daily. “We had been out of the paper recycling market in Des Moines for a little over 10 years, since 1993, when we sold our paper recycling group to Weyerhaeuser Co. About three years ago, the city of Des Moines asked us if we would be willing to get back into the marketplace so we could add some more competitiveness to the value of the commodities that they’re collecting.”

In addition to processing recyclables collected by Waste Management Inc. and Artistic Solid Waste, Mid America also specializes in collecting and hauling recyclable office paper for entities as large as the Ruan Center and as small as one- or two-person businesses.

Mid America operates each of its plants outside Iowa under a local name and manager, Barry said.

“In Lincoln, for instance, it’s Midland Recycling of Lincoln, and the managers are part of the infrastructure of the community. So we foster that hometown feel, even though we’re becoming a regional company. I think that’s created by the fact that we’re Iowans, and we understand the need to be part of the community. That ethic has become part of our corporate culture.”

Barry, an Iowa State University graduate who moved his family back to Iowa in 1989 after a 20-year career with Weyerhauser as an industrial forester, partnered with Container Recovery founder Porter Williams to add paper recycling to the company’s services. The company’s Des Moines plant is located in a refurbished freight terminal building it purchased from the Chicago and North Western Railway.

“After we built three plants, we decided to do the acquisition route (in the early ’90s) because you can start up quicker,” Barry said. “It takes about three years to get a green-field plant from concept to profit, whereas with an acquisition you only have about a one-year turn on that.”

In total, Mid America now employs about 350 people. In each of its operations, the company partners with agencies that employ developmentally disabled workers to serve as sheltered workshops.

“I have a lot of empathy for that personally because my wife’s aunt worked in a sheltered workshop,” Barry said. “I saw the meaningfulness of that job to her, so I said, ‘If I ever get the chance, we’re going to do that.’ So we work every chance we can with sheltered workshops.”

Last year, Mid America lost its New Orleans plant to Hurricane Katrina.

“We did make a tough decision where we’ve actually shut that plant down permanently,” Barry said. “We don’t think New Orleans is ready to recover as fast as everybody hopes, and we’re probably the last industry to get back on line. We still service New Orleans from our Hammond (La.) plant. In fact, we were within weeks of shutting down our Hammond plant because the New Orleans plant was a better operation and we were going to move it there.”

All of the New Orleans employees were given the opportunity to take jobs at other Mid America plants, which some did, he said.

The company is currently looking at three more potential acquisitions, Barry said.

“My function is to find the right fit into our system,” he said. “We’re very selective in who we acquire. There were three companies that we looked at in North Carolina, but we looked at ourselves and looked at the map, and said it doesn’t make a ton of sense to have something way over there that we can’t take care of the way we want to. So we’re looking very strategically; it has to be a good cultural fit, and it has to make sense geographically.

“The other thing we will look at is product diversification. Those will take us outside of our geographic boundaries, but focus in on one of our commodities and give us stronger positions within that commodity.”

Mid America’s facilities are using cutting-edge recycling technology, Barry said. For instance, at its Des Moines plant, which is Iowa’s only glass processing facility, Mid America uses an optical scanner that sorts whole bottles by color.

“It’s the only one in the world operating right now that does whole bottles rather than broken glass,” he said. “So we’re also leaders in technology. At our manufacturing shops, we actually manufacture our own equipment (such as conveyers and feeders for shredding machines). We’ll design it on computer, built it in-house and ship it out to the plants. We mostly do work for ourselves because we’ve become so large.”

Mid America’s San Antonio plant uses “single-stream” technology that eliminates the need for haulers to separate the materials at the curb. Instead, the paper, glass, aluminum and plastic are separated by specialized machinery at the plant. The company also uses single-stream for part of its Houston operations.

Whether single-stream technology will prove cost-effective for smaller cities like Des Moines remains to be determined, Barry said. The city of Des Moines is currently studying whether to drop curbside recycling of plastic, glass and aluminum in an effort to reduce costs and increase participation in paper recycling. A group in the study that recycled just paper showed a 20 percent increase in materials collected.

“We’re losing 35 to 40 percent of the materials anyway (to the landfill). If we can get more people to participate, even doing less material per household, we win because we’ve diverted more materials,” he said.

And because of Iowa’s bottle deposit law, about 95 percent of glass and aluminum containers are being recycled by other means rather than being picked up at the curb.

“To put them into the curbside program is very costly to the collector, because now they’re picking up more volume of low-value material,” he said. “The sorting systems we would have to put in are very expensive. … It doesn’t make sense to build multi-milliondollar recovery systems for little to no volume.”