Your PowerPoint Presentation Also Dries Your Hands

Follow Capital Cleaning's Louis Perez around on his East Hartford campus cleaning route, and you might think he's running for office.

"Hey, how are you?" Perez says to a passing fork truck driver. The wheels on his large gray cart make a rhythmic "click-clack" "click-clack" sound as he navigates his way to his first stop. It seems like Perez knows everyone.

"Brian!" Perez says, now leaving the mail room. "Goodbye, Cathy!"

Pleasantries aside, Perez has a very important job, protecting the company he's contracted to do work for – Pratt & Whitney. The forest of paper Perez picks up daily in his locked container could hold secrets about Pratt & Whitney's dependable products. But think about this for a moment. Have you ever wondered what happens to that document that you print, use, and later discard? A few years ago Facilities Director Renee Welsh and her team had an idea.

"There are industries out there that will revert that paper into its original state. And voila! We've got paper!" Welsh said from the East Hartford facility.

By the time all the paper in Perez's cart makes its way back his secure work area, under lock and key no less, the magic begins.

"The process here is to revert, recycle it. Re-purpose it, give it another home other than a landfill," said Craig Matava, facilities manager in East Hartford.

All the paper collected in East Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut, and North Berwick, Maine, eventually travels to this large space in East Hartford. Emails, spreadsheets, presentations, proposals, reports, sales figures, your grocery list, all gets dumped out.

"It all comes to this room, the shredder that's behind me," Welsh said, motioning to the machine that is behind her. "We have staff that manage that on a daily basis."

"They have to load the paper in, there's a nice little elevator that flips upside down and dumps the paper," Matava continued. "But it's a manual process; you have to feed the machine."

A reliable conveyor belt operated by reliable staff sifts the paper into a ravenous shredder. Perez ensures there are no paper jams, and technical data soon becomes spaghetti-like, quickly moving onto another conveyer belt where paper shreds go up, and then down, into a massive machine called the American Baler.

"I used to bale hay when I was young," Matava said. "These particular bales you cannot pick up, they take a fork truck to pick them up."

Over the course of a month, the bales are stacked like blocks, until a large truck backs into an East Hartford loading dock.

"These bales of paper means we're saving money," Welsh said.

A new life, a new purpose for the paper happens when it reaches a special facility operated by a company called SCA. Here, it's de-inked and cleaned in a pulper. The 'pulp-slurry" created is sprayed onto paper machines where it is formed, dried and pressed into a five-ton roll. Soon after, the rolls are cut into paper towels or bath tissue, and the paper that left Pratt & Whitney weeks ago comes back.

"If we've got this life cycle and got this cradle to grave, if you will. A piece of paper comes out of a printer and gets utilized to the fullest extent. It makes some of our wonderfully designed and engineered aerospace products and then it goes back into the garbage. It comes right back to us that we don't have to purchase from someone else at a higher expense," Welsh said.

Pratt & Whitney is also mirroring this Leadership Award-nominated process with cardboard.

Meanwhile, Louis Perez' outgoing personality will continue to be a staple of his daily pickup. But it's more than just securing paper. Employees should realize how vital this process is to keeping trade secrets – secure.

"Right now in this millennium, there are a lot of folks interested in reuse and recycling as opposed to destroying, destruction, putting it all in a landfill. I think that was the biggest key for me," Welsh said.