In this exclusive article for Packaging News, Bob McLellan, president of the Confederation of Paper Industries and chief executive of DS Smith Packaging, argues that the public must keep faith in the recycling process and calls on the government to standardise household waste collection in order to improve the quality of collections.
Recent articles in the national media have highlighted an apparent build-up of recovered paper due to a decline in overseas demand. The Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) would like to point out that this problem only arises with a small percentage of poor quality paper.
It is important that everyone knows that paper recycling is a great success throughout the UK. We need to keep on recycling paper & board packaging, even through this current economic downturn.
In the last 10 years we’ve seen a real success story with the amount of paper being collected in the UK annually now exceeding 8.6 million tonnes.
In fact, the UK papermaking industry has one of the highest recycling rates in Europe. For example, a corrugated case can be recycled and back in business in under 14 days.
Quality, quality, quality
The key to good recycling is quality - it’s fundamental to the process. Good quality recovered paper is still in demand on the global market and we expect this to continue throughout the credit crunch.
The highest quality raw material is produced from recycling systems that involve early segregation by whoever the waste belongs to, whether it be business or householders.
When it comes to domestic waste, we would prefer that materials are segregated at the kerbside.
If this is not possible, and sometimes it isn’t, then it’s essential that materials which are collected together at the kerbside are sorted to a high standard in the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF).
However, the existing investment in MRFs across the UK has sometimes failed to deliver appropriate quality. Unfortunately, the recycled material that’s been struggling to satisfy the market for recycled paper is too often from these sorting operations. The quality is just not good enough.
So it is true that there have been occasions where material has been stockpiled, but this typically only applies to a very small percentage of all the material that is collected, and it is a recent phenomenon.
The decline in demand from overseas markets in recent months has led to some instances of greater stockpiling but this is already changing for the better - Far East buyers are now back in the market. We should also remember that, while China is affected by the global economic slowdown, its GDP is still forecast to grow by 8.5% in 2009 (source: IMF).
We have to export
We need to face the fact that, currently, we do not have the capacity to use all of the waste paper collected in the UK. This valuable raw material is made into office paper, tissue, newspaper or corrugated cases and that means demand is related to activity at the paper mills.
The economic conditions facing our UK paper mills have been extremely tough since well before the start of the credit crunch. Costs, such as energy, have risen faster here than in many other European countries.
Some mills have had to close and that has meant a decline in our ability to handle our own waste paper.
Four paper mills closed last year and there are now just 54 left in the UK. However, while this has led to reductions in the UK’s capacity for recycling recovered paper, this situation is also changing for the better.
Over the next two years new paper mills are coming on line that will increase UK paper recycling capacity by approximately 1.2 million tonnes.
We can’t avoid the export of some recovered paper. It’s just a fact of life in today’s global economy.
However, there is clear evidence that recycling waste paper abroad, even in the Far East, offers a far better environmental option than either sending it to landfill, or incineration with energy recovery.
The burning issue
A recent study from WRAP clearly shows that recycling paper products is better for the environment than either incineration or landfill.
In the UK, recycling paper gives us a carbon saving equivalent to 1.32 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of paper recycled, compared with disposal through incineration or landfill.
Of course, in some cases, if the material is of particularly poor quality, then incineration with energy recovery may be the best environmental option, but we would always seek to recycle if possible.
So, what do we want?
Our need, as the paper industry, is for high quality recovered paper. So we call upon the Government to press on with the development of a national strategy for household recycling. The aim would be to increase the amount of paper we can recycle, right here, in the UK.
