Paper recyclers question Daily Mail article on market crisis

Steve Bell, new projects director at waste paper trader Recycling UK, told Packaging News he was disappointed by the Daily Mail‘s agenda and defended the strength of the recycling market for high quality material. “Paper mills will always require waste paper, but the price and quality have to be right,” he said.

Bell said that co-mingled waste collections were reducing the quality of collected materials and wasting a “huge opportunity to reduce landfill”.

“The big issue is councils need to source segregated materials, but current collection systems are not up to the job.”

He added there had been a “market correction” in October, particularly as China stopped accepting lower material grades, but that the market for recycled paper had picked up in the past two months.

“The waste paper market has been very good for the past three to four years and prices have gone up, but contracts need to reflect the market reality for this commodity.”

The Daily Mail today (5 January) reported that taxpayers were “facing a multi-million pound bill” to store 100,000 tonnes of waste paper and cardboard, which had become “virtually unsellable”.

A spokesman for the Environment Agency said, however, there had “not been any significant rise” in the number of applications for extra waste storage space.

In 2007, there were 840 registrations allowing for temporary storage of collected materials. To the end of November, there had been 859 registrations in 2008, an increase of 2.3%.

The spokesman added that 100,000 tonnes was “not a massive amount” in comparison to the 10 million tonnes reprocessed annually in the UK, but admitted that is was “hard to say” when prices in the recycling market might start to improve.

Slightly less than half (48%) of Packaging News readers responded to an online poll last month that they did not expect the recycled materials market to recover until “at least 2010″.

A fifth said it would recover in the next six months, while 32% said it would take until the second half of 2009.

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