Construction work to begin soon on Palm Paper mill

Germany's Palm Paper is now working on detailed plans for what will be the biggest mill investment in the UK for more than a decade and the company told letsrecycle.com yesterday that construction work will get underway soon, for completion by January 2009. This will be followed during 2009 by the installation of the paper machine.

The local authority for the development, King's Lynn and West Norfolk borough council has granted planning permission and planning officer David Parkin said that there had been few objections to the development.

Mr Parkin said: “The company is now in the process of discharging its planning conditions before construction work gets underway. We received only one or two objections from members of the public.”

There has been suggestion that a judicial review of the project could be possible but this is now as increasingly unlikely. The idea of a review was mooted by consultants Enviros who have had involvement in the Ecco newsprint mill project which is still on the drawing board for a site in north east England.

Derek Harman, managing director of Palm Paper Limited – the UK division of the company – said the company's sales office will be moving to new offices in King's Lynn next month. And, Mr Harman said that the company had already been in talks with potential suppliers of used newspapers and magazines.

He said: “We have already talked to a lot of people as wee needed to have some assurances about supplies before we committed to the mill development.”

Mr Harman explained that the current statitstics showed that of the 8m tonnes of waste paper generated in the UK, about half is being exporterd. Of this 4 million tonnes about 1.65m is newspapers and magazines. We will need about 500,000 tonnes of material for our mill to produce about 400,000 tonnes of paper.”

Winning material for reprocessing at King's Lynn will be down to contracts and price, said Mr Harman. He added that he thought local authorities and recovered paper dealers would be aware of the fact that the mill offers a domestic market for material.

“From all the discussions we have had with paper traders in the UK, they would prefer to sell to us for the mill will be here for 50 years. China is a major market but as soon as they start collecting more newspapers internally, they won't need to import so much as used newspapers traditionally stay in the country of origin.”