FORT KNOX, Ky. — When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from Huntington, West Virginia were faced with a mountain of outdated records to get rid of, some of which dated back to 1927, they reached out to the Fort Knox Recycle Center for help.
The Recycle Center here has a unique paper shredding capability that can handle large volumes of paper at a time. The Corps of Engineers had a large volume: nearly 30,000 pounds.
Jamie Daley, Recycling Program manager, said the West Virginia manager approached her over two years ago, wanting to use the Fort Knox shredders in an effort to reduce their costs. Then COVID-19 hit and halted their plans, until recently.
“She reached out to me about two or three weeks ago to confirm that we were still operating, and that all the things I had told her before were still the same,” said Daley. “We got her set up to come out and shred.”
Daley said that while the shredding services are free for clients to use, the program is a non-appropriated funds operation, which means they must charge for others to pay their bills. How they do that with shredding is by turning around and selling bails of shredded paper to mills.
Teams of Army Corps of Engineers employees arrived each day from July 18 through 22 with a truck and trailer loaded with boxes of documents. After arriving, they and employees from the Recycle Center sorted through the boxes to ensure only paper products made it into the hoppers.
Because the shredders can chop up about 3,000 pounds of paper in 45 minutes, Daley said the actual shredding of documents took only about two hours each day. Also, the shredding saved the Army Corps of Engineers a few thousand dollars, even with transportation costs factored in, while eventually generating about $4,000 in revenue for the Recycle Center.
“The manager told me she had priced it locally and the cost would have been around $5,000,” said Daley. “It’s a good financial win-win both ways.”
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