Man recycles ink to keep air clean

BASTROP COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) - Bill Hicks has been married, "100 years."

He has four children and nine grandchildren. He loves to play music, fish and golf. He is old enough to retire. So why does he spend his days driving a tractor-trailer rig all over the country, calling on newspapers and print shops?

"I believe I'm making a difference, period," said Hicks. "That's it."

Hicks and his business partner, Wayne Eads, own an outfit called Ink Recovery, LLC. Inside the trailer they haul around, is a recycling system.

This week, they backed their rig up to a loading dock behind the Austin American-Statesman. They attached two hoses to spigots inside an opening in the wall. They turned a lever, activated a pump and started performing a magic trick of sorts.

You see, when colored inks make their way through the printing process, they pick up dust from the air and tiny particles of paper. Some of that ink escapes the process and is collected by special sump pumps. Since it is contaminated by the dust and other materials, it can’t be reused. In the past, the ink was transported as hazardous waste and either buried in landfills or burned.

"It's hazardous to the land, the water table," said Hicks. "If it's landfilled, anything you landfill waste in can leak. If you burn it, it's got particulates in it that get into the atmosphere. No matter how you scrub it, it's still going to get into the atmosphere. So it needs to be reused."

Now Hicks knows a thing or two about ink. Two decades ago, he worked for an ink manufacturing company. More specifically, he worked for a subsidiary of the company that was developing a recycling system. Later, when the company’s patent expired, Hicks and Eads teamed up to create their own system.

"I joke around; I say that Wayne and I put this together with a crescent wrench and a screw driver," said Hicks. "We almost did in his back yard. We're poor boys; we're not rich people."

At this point, you have to know something about color theory: Black is what happens when all colors in the spectrum are combined. White is what happens when there are no colors from the spectrum present. So, if you want to recycle colored ink into black ink, you have to mix all the different colors together. The resulting soup is more or less black at that point.

Then you filter the material and subject it to a series of centrifuges. You pump the result back into the newspaper building, but because it has a somewhat blue-black tint rather than virgin black, the newspaper "meters" it into black ink stock, a little bit at a time.

That is it; the ink is recycled, or at least 90 percent to 95 percent of it is. The rest, the dust and other solids, is collected in a long cylinder. It has the consistency of rubber. No one has figured out a use for it, so it has to be trashed. Some cities allow it to go into landfills. Others still require it to be burned. Below is a behind-the-scenes look at what Hicks does:

Hicks estimates only 30 percent of American newspapers are recovering their surplus ink. So the recycling effort is still only making a dent in the ink pollution problem. It is a start though, and Hicks is determined to keep the ball, or the truck, rolling.