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The UK's Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) has urged European colleagues to take in to account the countries dependence on overseas markets when reporting material recovery statistics.

The Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) statistics for 2008 show that, excluding the UK, European countries recycled 89% of paper and board domestically. The UK, by comparison, exported around 54% of the materials.

CPI recovered paper manager Peter Seggie said: "The UK is in a rather unique position in Europe with increasing collections of recovered paper, but a shrinking domestic recycling capacity."

Seggie also called for caution not to overstate recovered material usage by forgetting imported products. Cepi statistics say the UK recycled 77%, or 8.8m tonnes, of the unconverted paper and board products it consumed last year, well above the 67% average.

However, this rate does not account for the net balance in imports, which in the UK represents an extra 1.7m tonnes of material. The CPI estimates that if this was taken into account the rate would be around the European average of 67%.

"The UK paper and board industry supplies just 35% of domestic paper and board consumption. Even with a very high utilisation rate of recovered paper in UK mills of 80%, they are only using just under 46% of the material collected," said Seggie.

Nonetheless, Seggie said the data showed the UK was making good progress compared to the rest of Europe.

CEPI PAPER RECYCLING RATES 2008
Germany 74.1%
France 64.3%
Italy 57%
Spain 68.8%
UK 76.6%
Average 67%