Today the company announced that its “Paper Retriever” programme, which last year paid schools and other not-for-profit organisations in North America some 2 million last year for recycling used newspapers and magazines, is being extended to the UK.
 The retriever logo which has been brought across the Atlantic |
Broomfields County Junior School in Appleton, Warrington is the first UK school to receive one of the bright green and yellow containers – known as Paper Retrievers. The aim, said a spokesman for the company, is for “children and the wider local community to drop off their used newspapers and magazines, as well as direct mail, catalogues, Yellow Pages and other directories, to be recycled into premium grade newsprint.”
The Ellesmere Port mill is run by Abitibi-Consolidated Recycling Europe which also runs collection services for many local authorities.
The firm has promised to “regularly service the container at no charge to each location, weighing the paper at the time of collection and providing schools with a quarterly statement and cheque. In a unique ‘win-win’ arrangement, participating schools will also be able to claim ‘recycling credits’, the money saved in reduced disposal and collection costs by local authorities who, in turn, will be able to claim the tonnage towards their Government set recycling targets.”
 One of the newly-liveried Paper Retriever collection vehicles |
Charities
Abitibi Consolidated said that more than 500 schools are expected to join the Paper Retriever programme by the end of the year, rising to twice that number by the end of 2005.
Local charities will also be beneficiaries of the new scheme, following a pledge by
Abitibi-Consolidated Recycling Europe to donate 1 for every tonne of recycled material it recovers. The company already donates a similar amount to Save the Children under a separate programme which rewards the charity for each tonne of recyclable material collected through its local authority schemes. More then 500,000 has already been donated in this way.
[…] Abitibi imports Paper Retriever to grow newspaper recycling – The retriever logo which has been brought across the Atlantic Broomfields County Junior School in Appleton, Warrington is the first … as well as direct mail, catalogues, Yellow Pages and other directories, to be recycled into premium grade … […]