Joey’s mill Kenduskeag man reviving textile machinery to recycle cotton

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The 1996 closing of the Striar Mill in Orono was hard for many, but Kenduskeag resident Joey DiSanto might have missed it the most. DiSanto didn’t lament, though. Instead, he brought the mill’s massive machines home, piece by piece, to give them another life.

Over the past six years, DiSanto has embarked on a project a friend of his calls “Joey’s Mill.” To DiSanto, however, his project is a reincarnated piece of Maine’s past.

Between 1980 and the mill’s closing, DiSanto worked in the blending department and as a watchman, a boiler operator, and generally maintaining machines which shredded old wool clothing back into raw material. After it closed, he stayed on to keep it heated through 1997 while the bank auctioned off anything valuable inside.

In 1999, he heard the mill and Ayers Island had been bought by George Markowsky, a professor of computer science at the University of Maine. DiSanto drove back to the mill he missed and offered to work there maintaining the property. Markowsky hadn’t specifically planned on hiring a maintenance worker.

“I’d never owned a mill before,” Markowsky said, but he decided he should hire DiSanto. The past eight years have proved him right.

“[DiSanto has] really helped to keep the place running,” Markowsky says. “He’s done every kind of work you can think of.”

DiSanto set to work maintaining the parts of the mill Markowsky was using, but elsewhere in the building, the machines DiSanto previously operated were quietly rusting over. “You miss the sound and all that cloth flying around,” DiSanto said. “I love seeing gears, belts moving.”

After a couple of years, an entrepreneur contacted Markowsky about using one of the pickers to shred old pantyhose to use in plastic. DiSanto got a picker machine up and running, and as he watched the material being ripped apart, just like the old days, an idea came to him.

“I think somebody up there wanted me to get that light in my head,” DiSanto said. He would buy the old machines, get them working and run his own personal mill at his home.

It wasn’t so different from what James Striar had done years ago. With an established business recycling wool clothing into raw material in Brewer, Striar saw an opportunity in the abandoned Orono Pulp and Paper Co. mill to expand his operations.

Two generations later, DiSanto saw opportunity in Striar’s abandoned machines.

Wool had become less common, but DiSanto had read of people buying recycled cotton and knew he could easily find old cotton clothing.

Before DiSanto approached his boss about buying the old machinery, he had to search the mill to make sure he had everything he needed. Besides pickers and shredders, the required items included a filter house in which to gather his material. For three weeks, he searched through the mill’s 360,000 square feet of space in his spare time.

He found it all. Even where parts were broken or missing, DiSanto saw the raw materials to make what he wanted. In a forklift abandoned by a local construction company owner, he saw a hydraulic cylinder capable of 600 pounds of pressure that he would use in a baling press for his cotton. The old three-phase motors were in bad shape and would be expensive to run, but DiSanto put a 1991 Ford Tempo on blocks and wrapped a belt around a bare wheel rim.

Finally, he took his plan to Markowsky, who sold DiSanto everything he wanted for $1. It turns out DiSanto got a good deal. A man who toured the mill one day looking for old mill parts remarked that a set of new spikes for the picker machines still sells for $3,000.

“I wasn’t going to use them,” Markowsky said of the machines. His plans for the island involve renting it as commercial space; it already serves as the headquarters for Markowsky’s software company, the Trefoil Corp.

“I’m not sure that it’s that easy to compete with foreign textile firms,” Markowsky said. Still, he has supported DiSanto, passing on articles about companies such as Bonded Logic, which makes house insulation from recycled denim.

Removing years of rust

Turning his vision into reality hasn’t been easy for DiSanto. The machines were too big to move, so he disassembled them and fashioned pulleys to lift some of the larger parts outside. He didn’t have a truck at the time, so he found himself paying people $50 to $75 to help drive huge machine parts to his home a half hour away.

It was more work than anyone expected, and DiSanto went through plenty of drivers to transport everything. “Each time someone helped me get something over, it was their last time,” he said.

Once the parts were home, DiSanto had years of rust to grind away. Again and again, he had to stop to clean the orange rust particles that had caked onto his face.

According to DiSanto, it was the hardest part of the operation. “If I wasn’t so into this,” he said, “I’d have quit after cleaning the first one.”

With the rust gone, the metal was painted hunter green and reassembled, looking as new as the machines did 80 years ago.

Today he has a shredder and a picker finished and running in his garage, with two more pickers assembled nearby. Behind the garage, a building as big as his home shelters his homemade baler and the filter house he took from the mill to hold the scrapped cotton before baling. Nearby, hundreds of trash bags filled with old thrift store clothes wait for shredding.

Beginning with the Ford Tempo sitting outside, gears, belts and axles run into the garage, driving the shredder and picker simultaneously. The motion also powers the hydraulic pump on the bale press. The spike cylinders in the shredder and picker are so well balanced, DiSanto once got the car’s speedometer up to more than 50 mph without hurting the machines.

Blower pipes in the garage send shredded, picked cotton straight to the filter house, where DiSanto can then toss it into the baler. He plans to build another addition for chlorine bleaching as well as a connection between his garage and the addition he built.

After six years, DiSanto said he ran his first test with the cloth in early August. He said he’s “still a couple of years away” from a fully operational mill.

With the end in sight, DiSanto says he has been thinking about his accomplishment. “I tell people: ‘This only comes around once in a lifetime,'” DiSanto said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m bringing something from the past back to life.”

DiSanto has been in communication with Gary and Joe Marchelletta, owners of a similar business in Etna called Family Yarns Inc. The Marchellettas are also former woolen mill employees, and since 1998 they have used old mill equipment they purchased to make a business that sells thousands of pounds of recycled material each week. He said the brothers represent a model for the business he wants to create.

DiSanto said few people have seen his cotton mill aside from his family and some curious neighbors.

When the weather is warm, he said, he works on his mill every chance he gets and devotes most weekends to it. DiSanto doesn’t have a figure on how much he has spent on the project, nor does he talk about the money he’ll earn from selling cotton. He says he just feels lucky he can work with the machinery.

“I love machines,” DiSanto said. “Now I’m surrounded by all of it.”