Aylesford appoints new head of recycling

The announcement came as Aylesford also marked the collection of its 60,000th tonne of paper from its kerbside recycling scheme with Tonbridge and Malling borough council at a special ceremony attended by the Mayor of the local authority.

The announcement of Mr Perkins as the head of recycling follows Chris White departing the firm at the start of February to take up the post of managing director at an unnamed food-grade plastics recycling company (see letsrecycle.com story).

Mr Perkins joined Aylesford from Biffa in 1994 as a recycling development executive and helped build the firm's recovered paper supplies from 100,000 tonnes-a-year to 500,000 tonnes-a-year. And, he has also been in charge of the administration function and the recovered fibre store, where recovered paper is kept.

In his role as head of recycling, Mr Perkins will be involved in working with local authorities, waste management firms, paper merchants, the community sector and other organisations in order to procure the recovered paper required by Aylesford processes.

“I'm certainly excited by the prospect of what lies ahead and I'm looking forward to finding new opportunities as well as developing existing ones further to secure our supply,” said Mr Perkins.

“With new technologies being developed all of the time, it's important that we, Aylesford, keep in touch with those developments and remain open to any system that delivers a high quality product. Quality will always be important – recycling only works if the resulting products meet the purchasers' required standards,” he added.

Milestone

In addition to Mr Perkin's appointment, the Kent-based firm has also announced that is has reached 60,000 tonnes of recovered paper collected from Tonbridge and Malling borough council's kerbside collection service.

The mill, which is within the Tonbridge and Malling area, is one of four paper mills in the UK to manufacture newsprint from 100% recovered magazines and newspapers. And, to mark the event, councillor Sue Murray, the mayor of Tonbridge and Malling, was invited to tour the mill.

She said: “It was an amazing sight to see the paper from the green box scheme being pulped and to realise that every tonne of paper recycled saves 17 trees. This means that residents in Tonbridge and Malling have saved over one million trees in the last 10 years.”

Aylesford said that the quality of the paper supplied by the local authority over the past six months made it one of the top five suppliers of material to the newsprint mill.

Gemma Barratt, area manager for Aylesford Newsprint, said: “The paper that we receive from the Tonbridge and Malling kerbside collections is of an excellent quality. It is important that we work with our suppliers to ensure that their collection methods are practical and yet ensure low levels of contamination.”

“Tonbridge and Malling have clearly worked hard to achieve this and that is reflected in the quality and quantity of paper processed here.”

In April 2009, the borough council signed a 10-year contract with Aylesford for its kerbside paper recycling contract.