Mrs Price emphasised to letsrecycle.com that WRAP remains fully committed to the project and always accepted the EU might review the grant.
The grant cannot be given out until the EU has given state-aids clearance. The new facility at Shotton, owned by UPM-Kymmene UK, is due to be commissioned by the end of September 2003, with full capacity reached in April 2004. It will divert an additional 320,000 tonnes per annum of recovered newspapers and magazines from the municipal waste stream, boosting the quantity of recovered fibre used at Shotton to 620,000 tonnes per annum.
Any such grant is looked at in a first stage review by the European Commission’s competition directorate. Then, if there is any question of the legality of the grant a formal investigation is undertaken and it is this formal stage which has been entered into by the directorate.
Unfortunate
Mrs Price said: “It was always possible that the project could would be looked at – one in eight such cases are reviewed.”
Asked whether the UK had been treated unfavourably by the Commission, Mrs Price did concede that the situation was at least unfortunate especially because the project was one of the first to be assessed under new EU environmental criteria. “We have drawn the short straw for a couple of reasons, the complaint and the environmental guidelines. I think the fact that the environmental guidelines are quite new is significant. They need to be persuaded that the need to increase recycling which has major environmental benefits is the main movitivation for the grant.”
Mrs Price said she didn’t think that WRAP should have expected an investigation just because one company was benefiting from the grant. “I don't think that it is given at all. Had we simply picked on Shotton there would have been more of a risk in the first place. But we had a set of demanding criteria and the Commission is positively interested in the competitive process which we undertook.”
Principle
WRAP could not, she explained, have agreed the principle of the grant before it ran its competition process. “You can't notify in the abstract. We need to give details on the costs will be calculated and you can't answer this until you know all the costs. We started work on the state-aid the week we appointed Shotton as bidder.”
Mrs Price said she was optimistic that a decision would come within nine months as although it could 18 months, the trend by the Commission is to investigate in the shorter time.
And she defended the decision to allocated funds to Shotton even if giving money for a project in a development area might have been easier to win approval or. “If you are prepared to structure where you put your government aid, to target selective assistance areas or small businesses it can be easier. We are putting it to a project where we will benefit recycling tremendously and we believe that under EU guidelines this is exactly the type of project they are designed to let through.”
And, she noted that UPM-Kymmene remains “committed to the project and will continue for the time being.
The only reason that they started was because they had been selected for the grant and they had confidence that the grant will eventually be received.”
See also: see letsrecycle.com October 2 2002.
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