How Tippecanoe County is working to upcycle cardboard, reducing waste in area landfills

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — KC McCreery doesn’t know how often you think about waste infrastructure, but he thinks about it every single day.

“The thing that bothers me the most about landfills is their actual geo location and why they’re chosen,” explained McCreery, CEO of Fiber Global in Lafayette. “Particularly, the one in Frankfort is right on a water stream — if you drive past the landfill, on the other side there is literally a water source that flows right past it. I mean, you’ve got massively contaminated, toxic materials in that landfill, and it’s not like that’s prevented from seeping into the soil.”

There are roughly 3,000 actively operating landfills across the United States, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Environmental Center, while an additional 10,000 closed landfills sit idly across the country. Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions generated by human activity in the U.S., according to the EPA, accounting for 14.3% of total emissions in 2021.

McCreery has visited and explored landfills all over the U.S., researching what he finds and talking with the EPA, and what he finds most disposed of among the rotting garbage is cardboard. With e-commerce’s explosion in popularity over the past 20 years, McCreery said the problem of how cardboard is handled post-use has accelerated.

Cardboard is not valuable to a lot of people, McCreery explained, so it’s not treated as a core commodity like plastics or other recyclables. In an effort to find a solution for America’s cardboard consumption problem, McCreery created a new wood-like product from corrugated cardboard that’s made entirely without the use of water.

The product, forged fiber board, is manufactured using extreme heat and pressure in a patented process. A few things that make the product more appealing to contractors, McCreery said, is that the forged fiber board is flame retardant, and water and mold resistant.

On top of the long-lasting qualities of the product, the price is comparable to that of other building materials, McCreery explained. A 2-feet by 4-feet sheet of forged fiber board that is a quarter of an inch thick is available for $10.35, according to Fiber Global’s website, which is how customers may currently purchase the product.

Visualizing Lafayette’s impact

From mid-November through the end of March, McCreery said Fiber Global was able to reclaim over 350,000 pounds of cardboard in Tippecanoe County that could have otherwise risked being dumped into a landfill.

While that number is staggering, McCreery said this is only the beginning of the work needed to reduce local impact on landfills, looking toward community commitment and education to move existing efforts to the next level.

“We go beyond cardboard — we participate in a lot of local initiatives to prevent any waste from going in the landfill that doesn’t belong there. And so, you know, I think Lafayette understands that there is a high risk,” McCreery said. “I think education is going to be a priority to a large degree.”

In 1999, the city of Lafayette was preparing to roll out a new fleet of bright red recycling trucks as part of the newly founded recycling program. Local elementary schools participated in the excitement by competing for the creation of the city’s recycling campaign slogan that would be painted on the side of each truck.

Out of the dozens of entries submitted to the Lafayette Sanitation Department for consideration, 13 were selected to be painted on the city’s trucks. One of the winners came from a Glen Acres third-grade class taught by Sally Coles. McCreery, one of Coles’ students behind the selected slogan “Recycle today for a better tomorrow,” said he can still recall how invigorated that recycling campaign was for him as a young student.

McCreery would grow up to attend Purdue University before going on to work at Subaru of Indiana Automotive, then working for Tesla as director of manufacturing and engineering, overseeing vehicle design, manufacturing and the launch of new factories. Working directly with Elon Musk was a unique experience, he said, one that exposed McCreery to innovation in new ways.

McCreery left Tesla in 2022 to form FP Solutions, a hardware-focused accelerator co-founded alongside former SpaceX senior executive Lewis Hong. Shortly after forming their company, the pair founded Fiber Global, stemming from the pair’s overarching mission of investing in green energy technology.

“For me particularly, I spent a lot of time trying to understand waste streams: Where does it go; how does it go; who owns the streams and who ultimately takes care of the streams of waste and what happens to it all in its end state,” McCreery said. “We ended up finding that cardboard is not valuable to a lot of people, and so we ended up creating Fiber Global around the concept of reusing and upcycling cardboard.”

But McCreery explains he didn’t choose Lafayette as the site for Fiber Global because it’s his hometown — it all came down to proximity and looking at what was ahead for Lafayette’s economy.

“Knowing the ecosystem of manufacturing in particular, and knowing the proximity to landfills, that added to the value of making the decision, but it wasn’t the ultimate reason,” McCreery said. “We did spend a lot of time meeting with local government and local leaders to understand if this is something this community is willing to jump in and solve. It really came down to asking, ‘How much do people really want to move the needle on an environmental issue?’”

Lafayette is a “common sense” community, McCreery said, meaning if there is a problem at hand, leaders come together to solve it. From McCreery’s point of view, the key to solving global issues, such as waste infrastructure, is beginning at the local level.

At the grand opening of Fiber Global in November, McCreery said he posed a question to community members, city officials and state representatives present: If we could be the first community to completely upcycle cardboard, would we do it?

For Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski, the answer was a clear yes, knowing Fiber Global’s goals lined up with the overall goal of the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan that launch in January 2023.

“It’s obviously a worthy goal," Roswarski said. "It will take time to achieve that goal, but it’s a goal we should all be interested in for several reasons. For us, it’s really a win-win with this being a Lafayette guy coming back here to Lafayette to start this business that will benefit our city greatly.

"It lines up with the direction we are taking the community in.”

Getting to the next level

Tom Murtaugh, Tippecanoe County commissioner, said when he heard about Fiber Global’s grand opening, he was instantly interested in their mission.

The county offers four drop-off locations for residents without curbside recycling pick-up, with the largest site being the Tippecanoe County Solid Waste District at 2770 N. Ninth St. While all four sites collect cardboard, Murtaugh explained the North Ninth Street location has a bin specifically for cardboard, which compacts the recyclable product into bales.

“So, we said, ‘Well, that’s easy. You can have all of that,’” Murtaugh said. “Previously, we were taking the bales to a place in Frankfort and getting literal pennies for it. We would rather it go to a local company that generates jobs and is generating economic development, so that’s a much better choice.”

Murtaugh said the county is continuing to work with Fiber Global on adding additional bins to the three other recycle drop off spots, which are located at Hershey Elementary School, Southwestern Middle School and in Stockwell. While large quantities of cardboard are recycled at those sites, Murtaugh explained, it is comingled with other recyclables and is ultimately transported to a materials recovery facility in Indianapolis.

But while the county and cities continue to expand on recycling opportunities for Tippecanoe County residents, one thing continues to limit progress from reaching a greater level of productivity among residents.

“We have struggled to get conversations around recycling going, and I think it’s really, really cool that Fiber Global is a business right here in Lafayette because that really starts the conversation about the importance of recycling,” Murtaugh said. “We have a ton of people in Tippecanoe County who are recycling, but we need to get to the next level.”

What that next level looks like, Murtaugh said, includes more recycling initiatives, more events and more educational opportunities for all ages.

But one hurdle county officials and educators must clear in order to reach that vision of low waste and upcycling of materials, Murtaugh said, is finding a way to make Tippecanoe County residents care about what is thrown “away.”

Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. She can be reached by email at jellison@gannett.com. Follow her on X at @ellison_writes.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: How does Tippecanoe County recycle cardboard?