Spanish firm green lights giant UK recycled paper mill

Spanish paper firm SAICA has announced it will build one of Europe's largest paper recycling mills at a site near Manchester.

Construction work on the £290m development will start later this year, and the plant is expected to begin operating from February 2012.

The company said that when fully operational, the plant will produce approximately 400,000 tonnes of recycled paper a year, which will be used to manufacture recycled corrugated boxes. It added that its new state-of-the-art recycling technology would produce enough metre-wide sheets of cardboard to cover the distance from Manchester to London every three hours.

Eduardo Aragües, President of the SAICA Group, hailed the project as a "huge investment" that underlined the company's commitment to bolstering its presence in the UK.

The mill will have a sizable impact on the UK paper industry's environmental footprint, according to SAICA. It calculated that the increase in recycling capacity will reduce the 450,000 tonnes a year of used paper that is exported from the UK for recycling, while also cutting the amount of container board imported from the EU.

The facility's direct environmental impact will also be reduced through the installation of a Combined Heat and Power system and onsite effluent treatment plant designed to enhance energy efficiency and limit waste from the plant.

The project, which is expected to create around 200 jobs, was welcomed by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson. "This shows great confidence in our economic future and has all the right ingredients," he said. "It is a long-term commitment in environmental technology, which will be central to the UK's growth strategy."

The project is also likely to be welcomed by the UK's recycling industry, which has been campaigning for more recycling capacity to be developed ever since the onset of global recession undermined the business case for shipping recyclable material to be processed in China.

The market has recovered significantly in the past year, but back in 2008 a collapse in the price of recyclable materials such as paper, glass and metal led to stockpiling by waste management firms as they waited for demand from China to return. The export market subsequently returned, but industry insiders have warned that greater UK recycling capacity is required to help protect against a potential repeat.