New Haven Independent

Simkins was founded in 1901. (it was called New Haven Pulp & Paper Company then.) Simkins recycles old newspapers into high-quality paperboard that ends up on supermarket shelves as boxes containing products from pasta shells to hamster food fresh.

Like many American manufacturers, Simkins has struggled to survive. This July it shut down for two weeks. Then it hobbled along for another eight weeks with dozens of workers idled.

Meanwhile, Camera patched together plans to resuscitate the plant. Camera spent most of his adult life in the plant, knows its every lever and cranny the way a golf pro knows every sand trap and incline on a home course. Camera retired in 2002. Two times company officials and plant workers asked him to return. Two times he said no. The third time, he felt he couldn’t refuse.

“If they close the place,” his old employees told him, “we’re not gonna have a job.”

Indeed, Simkins has the kind of jobs New Haven mostly remembers as museum pieces of a bygone industrial age: factory jobs that pay $14-$19 an hour, plus full health benefits, for people without college educations. Seventy percent of the workforce is black or Latino.

“They’re good people. Five or six just got out of jail. They have to eat just like the rest of us,” Camera said during a tour of the East Street plant. Camera worked at Simkins for 45 years before retiring. He lives in the Foxon section of East Haven. At 68, Camera is trim, with salt-and-pepper moustache and combed-back hair. He wears two gold chains, a black leather coat, black button-down shirt, black pants and shoes. He spends his day in constant motion among the complex’s buildings, calm, focused, interested in every detail of mechanics, marketing, and manpower.

“I came out of retirement,” he said, “to try to get this rolling again.” He’s convinced he can. “I absolutely believe,” he declared, “there is a niche for us.”

Even Camera knows that, niche or no niche, it’s not easy.

A New World in Three Years

Just how not easy, Camera discovered upon returning to work this year. He discovered how much had changed in his three years away from the Simkins clanging and bustle.

• The price of the waste paper Simkins buys to recycle had risen from $75 to $115 a ton.
• Simkins used to pay $26 a barrel for the oil that powers half its plant. Now it pays $60. (The rest of the plant is steam powered.) The daily cost for oil is now $24,000.
• One of Simkins’ larger customers, Wal-Mart, which buys paperboard for gift boxes, cut back its Simkins order by “several thousand tons” a year. Wal-Mart continuously squeezes its suppliers to cut prices to levels charged by competitors in nations like…
• China. China now undercuts American paper companies the way it has other industries, through lower labor costs and modern equipment.

No wonder Simkins had its largest-ever loss last year, according to Camera. (The company doesn’t divulge figures, he said.) No wonder Simkins’ parent company closed eight of its 14 plants since 2002. New Haven’s could have been one more.

Camera staved that off with a host of measures, some dramatic. Simkins can’t undercut China’s prices or labor costs. But it can compete by offering high-quality paperboard, while becoming more efficient, in Camera’s view.

Camera convinced the company to spend half a million dollars on new motors, plates and other upgrading of its huge machines. Simkins can’t afford brand new machines to compete with China’s smaller, more efficient models. But it’s improving its existing ones.

He negotiated concessions with the plant’s union. He didn’t get the health-care givebacks he wanted, but he won changes in the way overtime pay is calculated. Meanwhile, he restored his old system of shutting down the machines for two days after every 12 days of continuous operation. The workers preferred the 12 days on, two days off cycle, Camera claimed. (The plant operates on three eight-hour shifts a day. It’s too costly to shut the machines down every day.) Camera’s successor had kept the plant going seven days a week with no breaks, which wore down both the plant and the people.

Sleepless on East Street

“Nobody in New Haven knows what we do behind these walls,” Camera shouted above the din of the shop floor. “We’re the Little Giant that never sleeps.”

The Little Giant is a 385,000 square-foot expanse of huge open rooms filled with mammoth interconnected machines that turn slushy paper pulp into high-quality white paperboard.
The pulp is made from bundles of recycled newsprint which Simkins buys from dealers in Maine, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island. The bundles go into a 20-foot wide, 20-foot deep below-ground pool called a “pulper.” A metal mechanical “tail” weeds through the murky swishing paste to pull out wires, plastics and other gunk that doesn’t belong there.

The cleaned pulp is dumped into vats with chloride, then fed onto long banks of machines stretching 50 to 100 feet across the shop floor.
One-hundred-nine constantly turning cylinders spread out in four levels of rows, many covered with felt, move the pulp as it suction-dries and gets fashioned into sheets of paperboard measuring a 20th of an inch wide. It can feel like a heavy metal concert in that room, with all those gears clanging, not to mention the steam rising from the stage. It smells like soggy cardboard, though, not smoke.

The paperboard is clay-cleaned and brightened, then shot through the “Flying Knife,” which cuts the sheets and spits them out for workers like Cornell Edwards to catch and pile for shipment.

Don’t disturb Edwards and his coworkers for even a second. When a reporter, for instance, asked his name, that distracted him long enough for sheets of the paperboard to fly onto the shop floor in different directions and gum up the whole process. Foremen appeared from the wings, and everyone scattered to clean up the mess and get back in control of the work flow. The Flying Knife and its umbilically connected brethren don’t pause for human distractions.

Camera was in his element, describing the details of how each machine works.

“China just built several paper machines,” he said ruefully. “They’re running 3,000 feet a minute. I run 290-300 feet a minute.” Plus, the brand-new Chinese machines are two to three times as wide as their senior-citizen counterparts on the Simkins shop floor.

But those machines are still running. They’re running better than they did just six months ago, Camera said, thanks to the repairs his crew has been making. He sees no reason to give up.