Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404060122
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY JERRY ACKERMAN BOSTON GLOBE
DATELINE: PITTSFIELD, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
This bonanza, alas, is unspendable, already rendered into a zillion narrow slivers by shredding machines and strapped into 40-pound grey-green bales. Until one gets close enough to see the truth, it looks a lot like bales of fresh-mown hay.
These 2,600 bales - each containing about $105,000 of erstwhile Federal Reserve notes - are the raw material for the newest line of papers from Crane & Co., the staid and proper papermaking company located since 1801 along the Housatonic River in Dalton, Mass.
Within weeks, most of it will be mechanically and chemically reduced to a watery paste and poured into one end of a 200-foot-long machine in Crane's Old Berkshire Mill, ultimately to emerge as sage-green sheets of writing and printing papers and sold, trademarked, as Old Money.
Crane, 38 and a sixth-generation descendant of the company founder, said the brand name clearly is meant to capitalize on Crane & Co.'s reputation as a purveyor of fine social papers to the well-to-do and, it should be added, as the manufacturer since 1879 of the paper on which United States currency is printed.
The product line itself, however, symbolizes a drive for Crane & Co. to secure its future in part by riding the trendy wave of environmentalism.
Old Money, said Crane, is "recycling to the max," returning to its birthplace for a second life the currency paper that makes up 30 percent of the privately held firm's $150 million annual sales.
The shift is necessary, Crane said, to confront impending marketplace changes. For one thing, Crane & Co.'s currency-paper business is being nibbled away by credit cards and faces a major threat should the U.S. dollar bill be replaced by a coin. "Crane needed to grow itself out of this disproportionate dependence on one contract," Crane said.
But this move toward transition also has brought tensions within Crane & Co.'s trim array of 19th-century brick buildings here. "Are we now compromising the public perception of Crane? Are we going to drag down our image and identity? The internal conservatism of the company comes out here," said Crane.
Retailers report a mixed consumer response so far to the new line. Boston's prestigious Shreve, Crump & Low Inc. won't carry Old Money. "We more or less stick to basics," a store representative said. Also, hopes of brisk sales in ecologically conscious Cambridge, Mass., never materialized.
But Diane Rosenberg said Old Money is spending well at her Roanoke gift shop, RSVP Limited. "It is creating some interest," she said of items ranging from a 100-sheet memo pad that sells for $5.50 to a 20-sheet box of stationery for with 25 matching envelopes for $8.50.
"It gives us the opportunity to explain Crane in a different way, that they make the paper for our currency" without tarnishing the company's image for upscale stationery, Rosenberg said.
Visitors to the cement-block Pittsfield warehouse where old money waits to become Old Money inevitably, almost instinctively, run their fingers through the stacks of strawlike shreds, hoping to sift out an overlooked twenty.
Old Money's distinctive color, akin to a frothy sea-green, results from the ink used to print money. This, Crane said, is circumstantial: The ink proved extremely hard to remove and posed disposal problems - and once it was taken out, the resulting paper "looked very much like U.S. currency paper," suitable for counterfeiting. Better to leave it in, Crane said.
The notion to turn worn money into Old Money sprang from the Federal Reserve Bank's interest in "finding more socially responsible avenues" to retire more than six billion old bills annually, according to James Reese, the chairman of a Fed national subcommittee on recycling.
"That translates to about 6,000 to 7,000 tons," Reese said, and, aside from a small fraction that is burned as fuel and a tiny amount being used experimentally to make roofing shingles, most of it goes to landfills that charge $50 a ton or more.
The cash Crane & Co. reprocesses makes up about 3 percent of the U.S. used-money supply.
It comes, for the cost of shipping only, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, chosen because that bank packs its shredded scrap into bales that are easy to handle during the papermaking process.
The 120 tons of old currency that the Boston Fed produces each year is harder to handle, Crane said, because it is compressed into large metal bins for trucking to landfills. Should demand for Old Money grow, though, local bills, too, will be in demand.
Old Money is the first product to come on the market out of a new business development unit Crane & Co. opened two years ago to diversify product lines. A companion line, Denim Blues, made from indigo-dyed cloth scraps from Levi Strauss & Co. blue-jean factories, is being used by Levi Strauss for stationery and other internal paper needs and will soon be put on public sale.
by CNB