News in Brief

Mai Iskandar filming; Nabil, Magy and Adham from Cairo; Mo and John from Swansea; with Lyndon Rich and David Roman of MCR

The stars of a film documentary have flown home after working on recycling projects in Wales.

New York filmmaker Mai Iskandar is producing a documentary film following two students from Cairo's Plastic Recycling School, and this summer saw them visiting and working for both Monmouthshire Community Recycling in Caldicot and the More Green Recycling project in Swansea.

The Plastic Recycling School – in the heart of Mokattam, Cairo's largest Zebbaleen (Egypt’s indigenous garbage collectors) village – teaches boys to read and write, draft contracts and carry out various collection and recycling activities. The Zebbaleen achieve recycling rates as high as 85% and carry out a lot of reprocessing themselves.

Defra’s Business Reuse Fund (BRF) has provided a London charity with 51,131 to expand its IT reuse facilities.

Elephant Jobs was set up by CRISP (Community Recycling in Southwark Project), which promotes waste minimisation, reuse and recycling projects. At present CRISP operates an IT reuse project called ‘OFFERS/Ex-IT WEEE Recycling’, which collects unwanted electrical and electronic items and redistributes them to the voluntary and community sector.

The BRF grant will fund staff salaries and promotion to enable the organisation to expand this service to offer a viable and affordable alternative solution to local businesses for disposal of their waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE).

Kramer telescopic wheeled loader being used by Harrogate borough council

The environmental services unit of Harrogate borough council in North Yorkshire is now using a Kramer 750T telescopic wheeled loader to tackle a variety of materials handling and recycling duties.

The Kramer 750T model, with its load-over height of up to 4.51m, was selected by the council as the most suitable for the main application which involves handling material collected by the council's fleet of sweepers and gully cleaning wagons. The council had previously been using a combination of large conventional loader and forklift truck but both machines were old and becoming increasingly unreliable.

Council operations manager Ray McLaughlin said: “The feedback we received from all the staff, including our engineers, was extremely favourable for the Kramer with its superb manoeuvrability and all-round visibility proving to be a particular bonus around our confined site.”

Newport Paper managing director Matthew Hoare

Newport Paper, a specialist purchaser of recycled materials, has appointed Matthew Hoare as the company’s managing director.

Having joined the company in 2003 as commercial director, Mr Hoare was the driving force behind a 10-fold increase in turnover for Newport Paper. The growth resulted in the recent restructuring of the company.

The company's chairman, Ashley Hoare, said: “Matthew's 15 years' experience in the recovered paper sector was crucial to the growth of Newport Paper and I’m confident that he will guide us to achieve our ambitious long term goals.”

The Avery Weigh-Tronix system

Avery Weigh-Tronix has launched what it says is the UK’s first waste compactor usage monitoring system.

The system weighs and records waste produced by groups of businesses such as in airports, shopping centres and office blocks – allowing each individual business involved to be charged for the amount of waste they produce.

Bins are loaded onto an automatic hoist and weighed before tipping, with the bin weighed empty to calculate the waste total. Individual businesses can record their information with by accessing the system with a swipe card. Information can be uploaded to a computer via an Ethernet connection, or remotely using GSM.